Komal Rajak

‘WEWZONE’ –discovered another struggle story of a girl, exploring and striving to achieve empowerment in its true sense.

‘WEWZONE’– was in a dialogue with Ms. Komal Rajak , scholar and researcher, pursuing Ph.D from Delhi University and researching over ‘Ambedkar and Women Empowerment’.

Ms. Komal talked of her life experiences and how she is still exploring different layers of empowerment and different ideologies of feminism. Ms. Rajak, counting on the journey of her life, recollected about the struggle and hurdles she faced on every turn, be it a challenge of pursuing higher studies, going abroad or working in the late hours. She marks that the patriarchal society has closely fixed some standards of being right for women and failing to stand by them or fulfill them tags them as a ‘wrong’ in society. Ms. Komal hence marks that breaking down of this dominating superficial structure from the very base is very important to achieve the true form of empowerment and strike a balance between the genders in every walk of life.

Ms. Komal mentions she is the first and the only girl in her family pursuing higher studies. She believes that an individual’s views and ideologies depend and breed on the very basic value system with which they have grown up or are living with. Ms. Komal talked of her personal experience where she faced lots of questions and dissent from her relatives and even the parents who were not very sure of her decisions and strong aspirations. However she successfully convinced her parents to support her decisions and her parents slowly made a liberal move with time.

Ms. Komal believes in Ambedkar’s ideologies of Feminism and chalks out that women empowerment is not about dominating rather it works on the parallels of equality.  For her empowerment is when one can negotiate for his or her rights. She believes that education in its true sense should be able to bring in meaningful transformation from the very grass root level.

Ms. Komal concluded with an assertion that empowerment and feminism should be so modeled that they strike equilibrium in their applicability between men and women.

-Kartik Khurana