Woman Of Steel - Surabhi Agrawal From XLRI - Celebrating Womanhood On InsideIIM

Surabhi Agrawal is studying HRM at XLRI, batch of 2018.
What was high school like for you? How did it contribute to your personality/ the person you are right now?
There were many personal ordeals I had suddenly come face to face in high school. I had no way of knowing how to deal with. My entire life had shifted in the past year and I was trying to come to terms with it. I had never before found myself lacking in self-reliance. And which was why I was unable to seek help either. I had never required much of it before. Help is always easier to give than to take. But the very living through it each day, on my own, strengthened me. I learnt how to eventually balance things, manage my emotions, patience, and tolerance. I built many life skills during this time. These I have followed till date. I took to writing poetry and had better understanding of the energies around me, their impact on me. I made friends who are all constants in my life now. They are a reaffirmation of each personal promise that I then made and kept, which has made me who I am and would be.
If money was no object, what would you do all day?

As of now, I would be teaching children, who work during the day around North Campus in Delhi, which I had been doing, in part, during college- but sparingly. And my day would involve learning what to do to for them and planning it. A friend of mine has this project that she started with some friends of hers - called ImpArt. They impart art to children from the underserved section and encourage upcoming artists to increase the reach of their work. I love the idea. I would work to widen the network of the same.
What advice would you give to a 5-year-younger you?

It’s March. My 5-year-younger me is appearing for the Class 12 board examinations. I would tell her- ‘All you can do, is all you can do.’ And that it’s no moral obligation to always know where the road leads. There is some faith to be had in fate. That –in the words of John Steinbeck- ‘Nothing good gets away’. And that the dots always, always connect themselves backwards.
So, I would tell her to run some more. But never away from things, for they shall only pursue her as much harder, instead, towards things she wants, for those things shall stop to play hard-to-get for as longer. I would finally tell her that her 5 years older self is proud of her, even without all this wisdom from the morrow.

How do you think women are better equipped to deal with problems as compared to men? I think life builds people. I do not think it’s on account of being women i.e. their biology, that they are in general, better equipped to handling problems, but on account of what the society in large, their own lives in particular, brings their way that they learn to deal with them. The humans’ is a heroic spirit. Not one constructed to be ruled. When the larger part of the globe shifted to being a patriarchal society, women chose- not to adopt but to adapt. Adapt to standing their ground firm, no matter what happened. To face it head on. Much like a soldier learns to stand her/his turf in the face of an impending attack. Many IIMs and other b-schools award extra points for being a woman. What is your take on that? Do you propagate the concept OR Have you faced any backlash for the same? If pushing someone down is considered a wrong-doing, should extending a hand not be seen as an act of right doing? Only because it is extended to women, it requires a justification? It is not contested that gender ratios are alarming, not only in the world population but in most professions likewise and how there’s an acute need to fix it. Since premiere b-school graduates, more often than not, go on to become the prime movers in the industry, it is imperative that there be more women in these schools in the first place, half to represent half the population. Hence, I support the move in this regard and have faced no backlash for it. Name one incident that you encountered where someone told you, you couldn’t do something because you’re a woman.

I am a mechanical engineer. That one line itself draws sceptical reactions from most people. This was even more so when during my engineering studies, I started working on a project to build a student version of a formula style prototype car for a national competition. I, with a team of another 12 girls worked for 18 months to build the car from scratch. Right from the spaceframe to the suspension and steering system- we designed and fabricated it. One day, two of us had to escort a consignment of steel tubes of about 150 kg to our workshop, when the lorry puller bailed out. We only stopped two minutes to think if we needed it then- not if we could. The tubes would have rusted on the weekend in the workshop if they wouldn’t be painted with a primer in time. The two of us decided to pull the lorry ourselves- for the three km distance. At least a dozen men stopped, gaped, laughed and said- we couldn’t do it until we reached the college. Once there, every guy we met who knew us, laughed and said we could do anything.
 If you are out on a date, do you prefer to pay yourself? If you insisted that you want to pay for yourself, how did the other person react?

Yes. I do. I do not understand the opposite concept. Some distorted feeble interpretation of chivalry perhaps. And I have seen both types of reactions. One where the person resists, argues or ‘allows’ as if one does when indulging a child, second where it was seamless- that we each paid half. Or in whole, every alternate time. As equals.