Profile: The Purity Of Impurity

Aditi Gupta could well be your girl next door, leading a happy enough life. At work, she inches up the corporate ladder. But she chooses to be different. At 31, she stands tall as the founder of Menstrupedia, a one-stop shop for information on, of all things, menstruation — in an entertaining way.

The website Menstrupedia, up and running for roughly three years now, gets 1.5 lakh visitors a month and has a community of 250 volunteers who write blog posts sharing their stories and opinions on menstruation.

Relentless in her efforts to push through her initiative, Aditi has one message to share with each and every girl: Periods do not make you impure. “It is an empowering process and a girl turning into a woman should embrace the change with pride and grace,” she says.

Forbidden Subject
Yet the confidence that she exudes today was completely non-existent when she hit the age of 12 and told her mother about starting her period. The little girl was confused when her mom made it a hush-hush affair, giving her a list of dos and don’ts. Worse still, she was handed a few rags to use for her hygiene because her middle class family believed that buying sanitary napkins was unnecessary and “shameful”.

Apart from the physical pain and discomfort that she faced, the idea that menstruation was “impure” became stronger when her friendly biology schoolteacher skipped the chapter on menstruation and childbirth.

Aditi’s discomfort on the subject of periods resurfaced in 2009 during her final year of graduation at the National Institute of Design when she had the chance as a Ford Foundation Research scholar to study the awareness of menstruation among semi-urban pre-teen girls. Her field research showed that awareness was abysmally low, largely due to lack of information and any authentic guide or source of information about this natural occurrence. Aditi shared her plight with her then batchmate and later husband, Tuhin Paul, who was equally taken aback by the lack of basic information available. Aditi, despite being the educated woman she was, wasn’t aware of several facts on menstruation.

Together, they decided to take the bull by the horns and created a comic book prototype in Hindi on basic information regarding periods that was tested among young girls attaining puberty. Unfortunately, the project had to be shelved due to lack of funds even though it received tremendous response.

Marriage and their jobs did not dim the couple’s enthusiasm for their first project though, and the motivation to follow up on the Menstrupedia project preoccupied Aditi so much that they moved to a smaller house so they could save and fund the project.

The couple booked a domain and uploaded the comic book under the name of “Tales of Change” and it was around this time that Aditi qualified for the first round of an accelerator programme of IIM Ahmedabad, sponsored by a local financial daily. It was the catalyst they were waiting for and soon enough the couple quit their jobs to dedicate themselves to their dream, armed with savings of just Rs 2.5 lakh. Though they did not qualify beyond round one of the programme, it served as the launchpad and inspiration they needed. With the support of friends, particularly Rajat Mittal, now a part of the core Menstrupedia team, they were able to get technical expertise.

Meaningful Resource
The Menstrupedia website was launched in November 2012. A later breakthrough was the launch of the Menstrupedia comic book in September 2014 with a crowdfunding initiative yielding Rs 5 lakh.

Research for the comic book has been an eye-opener for Aditi as she came across a million myths and taboos that shroud menstruation. “From a teenager in an urban locality who believed she would get pregnant if she swam during her periods to a rural girl who believed periods can only happen when you have sexual relations, I think I have seen it all,” says Aditi. Through the Menstrupedia website and comic book, Aditi’s attempt is to reach out to every girl who is facing any trauma related to menstruation. Today, the book comes to the aid of social workers, sex education teachers and young girls who are at the threshold of puberty. Aditi’s five-year roadmap is to translate the Menstrupedia comic book in all regional languages, make the book a part of the Indian curriculum and reach out to African nations where this could be a much-needed resource.

On the personal front, she says she is blessed to have a partner in Paul who not only is the bedrock of her life, but the life support system that Menstrupedia runs on.

Aditi believes that gender bias runs deep in society. To make the startup ecosystem more conducive for women, she suggests hiring an equal number of men and women and making office spaces more “mother-friendly, where mothers can bring in and feed their babies. Most of all she says that one needs to stop being judgmental or patronising about female entrepreneurs. “The only person who stops you from doing anything is you,” says Aditi. “So go ahead and do what you want to do with your life.”

While she says she has not set out to change the world in one staggering sweep, making a difference a little at a time gives her the confidence that she will live to see a world in which “periods and menstruation are no longer taboo and girls need not buy sanitary napkins wrapped discreetly in newspaper and an ominous black poly bag.”