Journey with Haiyya in 2020
It is so important to mention the year. 2020! The year which gets missing when I give reference to my friends as last year, I always meant 2019. This 2020! How cruel, that year and the following year might be, it still has given few opportunities that will be remembered for its positive significance. One of such rare was our journey with Haiyya Incubation 2.0 program that started from August 2020 and ended in April 2021.
When a group of women from She Creates Change and Indian School of Democracy came together in March 2020 to explore their journey in politics, the announcement of Haiyya program gave us a hope to channelize our thoughts, plans, intentions to a direction.
The journey started with application process. We worked remotely on a google document to submit the application exactly few minutes before the dead line. See our consistency. We always did the job in last hour only. Please don't label us as lazy or procrastinated, we are just so productive when manage our lives in emergency. We were not able to finalize to give our group’s name for two months, but this application helped us to do that as we had to give a name to our campaign. What a powerful and lovely name we created for us — Circles of Feminist Politics. We argued like two different political parties in the WhatsApp group to keep the word “feminist” or not. We ae glad that we could break our fear of bullying if we go public with this powerful ‘f’ word. We knew, this word will also help us in getting like minded people.
And we got selected! On the top, we got two brilliant women as our coach and buddy to work with us. The other bonus was to have another partner Gautam in our pod that made our tiny family truly diverse. The organizing document made us mad at many given points, when we struggled to even understand. But the space gave us the opportunity to brainstorm together, a way for our scattered team to work even in the night from 10pm to 12am and from 5am to 7am. We worked like crazy, still not able to submit in advance. just on time was like our tag line in this campaign. But we were happy even to finish those long forms and sending to our coaches. This was also putting us to think new, understanding from different perspectives, listening others perspectives. However, we were also behaving like school students to submit these assignments like we were going to lose some marks. that was funny. But we had done all of them.
one of the highlights was of course the PPC workshop, meeting a community 70 odd changemakers across country. Apart from learning the techniques of Stories of Self/Us/Now, we built relationships. We heard others, others heard us. Thanks to Haiyya for this connection, that created hopes to know so many others working tirelessly to make our lives better, even in the time of hopelessness.
We knew, we weren't participating the way its designed. But we were also struggling with COVID, ill health, emotional health breakdown, long working hours and on top of the subject — politics was anyway very scary. While we all were up for it, working towards it, it had also made us anxious. It wasn't easy for us and still not to chose politics as career. We are aware about our fear, anxiety and still open to travel this path.
Thank you Vandita, Arjama, Haiyya team to be there for us, to see a WhatsApp group getting a name and logo to have its website and going public. We are building a legacy, a legacy of change that will be a platform for under represented gender and sexual minority people to chose politics as a tool of change. We are committed to break the structural inequalities to ensure marginalized gender and communities are able to exercise their human rights. We are committed to create a Just and Equal Society
