I want to hug this guy. Like, really. Buy me a airplane ticket.
Arunachalam Muruganantham is a hero. I use that word in its full magnitude. Since I am now an expert on the matter, having read the entire article, I'll speculate on what motivates this man:
- Grit. Crazy amounts of grit. The article is full of good quotes, but my favorite is what he said after being abandoned by his mother:
"It was a problem for me," he says. "I had to cook my own food."
- Humility combined with hunger:
"Luckily I'm not educated," he tells students. "If you act like an illiterate man, your learning will never stop... Being uneducated, you have no fear of the future."
"Every time he comes to know something new, he wants to know everything about it," [his wife] says.
- Love of humanity, on some level at least:
"Anyone with an MBA would immediately accumulate the maximum money. But I did not want to. Why? Because from childhood I know no human being died because of poverty - everything happens because of ignorance."
As an aside, I LOVE the picture of his wife and daughter toward the end. This one photograph lends better context to the story than all the others combined. I know a single picture means nothing, but the look in his daughter's eyes makes me think she'll inherit something of her dad's baddassness.
And as another aside, bloody god-damn fucking hell, are the following bits really true?
There are still many taboos around menstruation in India. Women can't visit temples or public places, they're not allowed to cook or touch the water supply - essentially they are considered untouchable.
There are also myths and fears surrounding the use of sanitary pads - that women who use them will go blind, for example, or will never get married.
> There are also myths and fears surrounding the use of sanitary pads - that women who use them will go blind, for example, or will never get married.
Such myths abound globally, especially in rural environments. Worse myths exist around tampons--that a woman who uses a tampon is no longer a virgin. The implications of this in more rural societies are staggering, as young women can lose marital prospects or even be killed.
What impressed me most about his work was the lengths he went to in order to understand the problems the women were facing. That "football uterus" made him an outcast and he was rejected, which is not wholly unlike how menstrual women were treated in his village. He really got the full "customer" experience.
His work will also greatly help those women who have severe menstrual bleeding problems, in which they bleed non-stop for weeks (or months or, sadly, years) at a time. Not only are they outcasts in their communities, but even children will pelt them with rocks. It's profoundly sad.
It might sound trite, but we hear about the man who built the Taj Mahal for his beloved wife. Look at how much he is revered! Now consider what this man has done out of love for his wife--he has far eclipsed even that magnificent structure.
> Worse myths exist around tampons--that a woman who uses a tampon is no longer a virgin.
Lest someone believe this is a belief held only in rural areas, let it be clear that ideas like this are incredibly common in not-so-rural places like in the US. It's usually accompanied by some equally ridiculous beliefs about what virginity is in the first place (protip: it's about having sex for the first time, not about whether the woman bleeds or how "tight" anything is), hard to find comprehensive and unbiased education, the total lack of knowledge of or misinformation concerning alternatives to pads and tampons (reusables, cups), and straight up shaming and misinformation about birth control usage. The big difference between the poorer and the richer is that honor killings, genital mutilation, and whatnot are far less common for the latter.
I love what this guy did for his wife and other women in the same situation, but there's no shortage of similar problems for women elsewhere and I wonder if there will be something revolutionary on that front too any time soon. I've been considering going to med school and see if I can eventually merge my interest in that and tech at the same time to do something here but that's a long term iffy goal, and surely there are already others interested in the same thing too.
I'm pretty lucky to have had reasonable and educated parents that were willing to tell me (or let me discover) all I wanted to know about these things when I was 10. But it feels like at least once a week if not daily I discover a teen or a preteen or even an adult woman asking basic questions on one of the women-focused communities I spend my time in. I wish I could help them. :(
I have a bit of a problem with the way you're talking about "virginity". Scientifically, it's not a concept at all. In fact "vagina has been penetrated at least once by an object, whether penis or not, and hymen possibly broken" is a more scientifically valid definition of female loss of virginity than yours. So basically, you're wrong, the problem isn't people thinking that using a tampon is loss of virginity; the problem is people thinking that "virginity", however defined, has any particular significance.
People that marry as virgins have a much lower chance of divorce[1]. If you think that stable families are a good thing for your society to have, then you have to reject "sex positive" modern culture and value virginity.
Coincidentally, the family structure of the west has rotted since the sexual revolution of the 1960s[2]. Maybe if all those damaged children of divorce had a say in the matter we'd return to traditional morality and shaming of sex outside of marriage. The highest value of society shouldn't be doing whatever feels good regardless of the consequences.
I think happy families are a good thing for society to have. Divorce is not ipso facto bad. Unscientifically, so far in my life I have seen far more children damaged by a toxic family life than by divorce. It's hardly surprising that if you've been with the same person your entire life, you're going to be very afraid of change even if your home environment is terrible.
Of course, it's preferable to choose the right person to marry and settle down with in the first place, so that divorce isn't even on the table. This takes careful introspection and maturity. How does forcing people to get married before they even find out if they are sexually compatible help? How does tying an important life decision to irrational biological instincts help people choose sensibly, so they can have a happy life?
>Maybe if all those damaged children of divorce had a say in the matter we'd return to traditional morality and shaming of sex outside of marriage
Traditional morality? How traditional? Which era do you think had superior morals? 50 years ago, when racism and sexism were common? A hundred years ago, when women couldn't vote? 150 years ago, when brother fought brother over the right to keep slaves?
I think your point is quite possibly the greatest example of religious thinking I've seen for a while.
Perhaps the family structure is just as rotten as it always was but now we don't lobotomise our depressed wives, pile them up with valium and beat our kids to shut up about it.
It's no longer acceptable to put up with shit and abuse and unhappiness is the greatest thing that has happened to the western world.
"Over the past two decades, the use of antidepressants has skyrocketed. One in 10 Americans now takes an antidepressant medication; among women in their 40s and 50s, the figure is one in four."
To be clear, that does not imply that people are more depressed over the past two decades. On the positive side, it could mean that we're finally able to diagnose and treat something that has plagued us all along. On the negative side, it could be the direct result of the Big Pharma marketing and profit machine.
Where did I bring religion into it? It's valuable to have community norms that prevent people from throwing away their family as soon as times get rough or life fails to be "fulfilling" or entertaining. At least, ours is the first society that's ever thought differently, so we'll get to see how this whole experiment plays out.
Single parent families are a big part of the increasing economic stratification between rich and poor, and I expect our amorality will bear even worse fruits as time goes on.
Religious thinking is not about religion. It is a logical concept where the conclusion appears out of thin air devoid of any connection with the evidence. Similar to magical thinking but probably less fun.
Whilst you might be right that our amorality will bear worse fruits, the status quo prior to this wasn't any better ergo morality and the stable family isn't necessarily better, just different.
The difference is purely that people don't suffer in silence now. This in itself is a wonderful freedom that we all deserve.
People that marry as virgins have a much lower chance of divorce
There are several confounding variables affecting this correlation, notably the fact that people who marry as virgins are much more likely to be practicing Christians (the data set is of US women).
While I personally think the above post is morally repugnant, I was very disappointed to see that it had been downvoted significantly and I upvoted it to try to balance it out. The poster might be wrong but he did so with a civil tone and an actual attempt to include citations. I question his basic premises but this is exactly the sort of thing that free speech should protect. He may be wrong and you can ignore it but you shouldn't be allowed to shut him up.
I'm a guy, and I grew up pretty rural and it was not terribly uncommon for some of these ideas to float around. Many girls I knew were not taught anything at all except all the various religious negatives about women's reproductive bits and as they hit puberty had no idea what to do.
A few teachers in my high school took it upon themselves to provide a sort of underground sex-ed for some of the girls who couldn't get parental permission for the official classes.
There was a fairly large Pentacostal group at my high school (you may recognize them as guys dressed like 1920s farmers and girls with long hair and all denim floor length skirts) and this group of teachers were a virtual life-line for those girls. [1] [2]
1 - To get an idea of what the mindset is read this page and the comments http://www.themodestmomblog.com/2012/07/why-i-wear-skirts-al... and then meditate on why women growing up in this have a terrible lack of knowledge and misunderstandings about their bodies.
I don't want to make assumptions about gender on HN, but if you grew up female it was kind of hard to avoid. You can just search for "tampon virgin" and come up with a ton of sites and people that try to reassure girls that using a tampon doesn't mean you lose your virginity.
I also grew up in LA and not in the middle of some super conservative area, but my girlfriends used to freak the hell out when they needed to dip into my stash during emergencies and all they found were tampons. Sex ed until I took the high school edition didn't help much there either. It was only into high school/college that tampons were way more commonly used. Today I still have a mix of tampons and pads in my bathroom for anyone that needs it.
For the other stuff...idk. I hang out in /r/twoxsex and used to hang out on the VaginaPagina LJ community and read the hell out of Scarleteen among other resources. It's a bit self selecting, but there's a lot of myths that get busted often. One I can think of - I started hormonal birth control really early because I had very heavy+painful periods with iron deficiency anemia (like, passing out in the middle of the street bad) and my parents and I went through a couple different doctors that were all judgmental about a 13-14 year old on the pill. I eventually just went to Planned Parenthood for gynecology needs (amazing people!) and they were all understanding and hush hush because parents of other women would sometimes illegally pester them for more information. So there's the "young teen/woman on birth control must be having sex and not need it for anything else" bullshit right there. Another one: right now I have an IUD, and everyone feels the need to tell me about the one friend of a friend story about a uterine perforation - legitimately a risk, but not like it's an inevitability for everyone using the IUD. There's also the twist on the tampon virginity that involves the menstrual cup. I also like to talk about skipping periods since I used to do it for a few years, and so. many. people. think it's a terrible thing to do. Meanwhile every doctor I had since going to Planned Parenthood thought it was a good thing to do, and this year for the first time in ~14 years since hitting puberty I finally have normal levels of iron without making an effort to supplement it. It's pretty wild. So much of it is so everyday if you spend enough time around frustrated women that I almost forget that these are really big problems.
> if you grew up female it was kind of hard to avoid
>I also grew up in LA and not in the middle of some super conservative area
>So much of it is so everyday if you spend enough time around frustrated women
I grew up in a fundamentalist conservative family in the midwest who believed the earth was 5,000 years old. Even we thought the "tampons kill your virginity" thing was ludicrous. I can believe it's a problem in the third world, but suggesting it's a common modern day belief in a first world country like America seems a bit hard to believe.
(A lot of religious people are still weird about the pill, though.)
This is one of those unusual posts to which I have nothing of value to add, but feel compelled anyway to take the time to say that it's one of those insightful perspectives that I find inspiring.
Religions (and consequently certain traditions) that have survived until today have an incredible obsession with mensturation. This is just another stick to beat and humiliate women with. It is unbelievable (for a questioning, inquisitive human being) that Bronze Age traditions and beliefs are still revered today.
I could only think of one verse off the top of my head, but here are several. The Leviticus 15:19-30 reads a lot like what was described in the article. http://www.openbible.info/topics/menstruation
1) Have you read the Christian holy text? I don't expect you to have read everything, but if you're going to make the claim that you did, you should have at least read the New Testament and the Pentateuch.
2) Could you please explain, in your own words, what the New Testament says about the laws presented in the Old Testament? Specifically, I'd love to know how you interpret Mark 2, Acts 10, Acts 15, and the book of Galatians, especially Galatians 2. Considering that Jesus himself didn't obey all of the Jewish civil and ritual laws (see Mark 2) yet proclaimed himself to be sinless, on what basis do you claim that Jesus teaches that Christians should obey the civil and ritual laws?
3) Isn't it a little bit arrogant to make a specious claim, thus demonstrating that you don't understand the Christian bible, then immediately accuse Christians of not reading their own holy book?
I always find it interesting how people like you think your superficial, amateur exegesis of the bible trumps thousands of years of scholarly thought and debate. So Christians got it wrong from day 1, and kept getting it wrong for centuries, but then Crake came along and set us all straight.
Yeah well, welcome to the early modern period. The Catholic Church from the beginning had outlawed the persecution of witches and condemned belief in their power as superstition. But people will still do crazy shit.
Woman being unclean during menstrual cycle is part of Abrahamic religions. But I guess this comes from the bigger problem of "sex" being wrong unless it constitutes "breeding".
Actually some of those regulations are more akin to health regulations. Granted, they didn't understand disease at the time, but they were able to find things associated with it to avoid, like contact with blood.
The only Abrahamic religion that views sex as only for breeding would be Catholicism (and maybe a few other smaller sects). Judaism, Protestants and Muslims all believe sex is a normal healthy thing.
You may be reading it wrong. Sex is viewed by the Catholic Church as an act of love between man and wife, that can't be dissociated from breeding. It is not only for breeding, but it must be conducive to breeding.
It is laid out in very expressive form, if a bit long, in the Humanae Vitae Encyclical Letter by Pope Paul VI. If you don't wish to read the whole text, lookup points 12 and 14.
You may also be reading it wrong. I suggest you look up paragraph 11, which directly contradicts your "must be conducive to breeding" claim:
"It does not, moreover, cease to be legitimate even when, for reasons independent of their will, it is foreseen to be infertile."
Insofar as your claim "can't be dissociated from breeding" can be constructed as a correct claim, it requires understanding that to mean it cannot generally be actively sought to be dissociated from breeding, but even that is incompletely accurate as (per paragraph 16) "If therefore there are well-grounded reasons for spacing births, arising from the physical or psychological condition of husband or wife, or from external circumstances, the Church teaches that married people may then take advantage of the natural cycles immanent in the reproductive system and engage in marital intercourse only during those times that are infertile, thus controlling birth in a way which does not in the least offend the moral principles which We have just explained."
(The position laid in Humanae Vitae has often been criticized for being somewhat incoherent, which isn't really all that surprising given its history. See, e.g., [1])
That is not really an idea found in the Tanakh. I mean, the writers are unanimously in favor of breeding, but I don't think any of them suggest that sex is only for that purpose.
Apparently there is an old Orthodox liturgical tradition that women abstain from receiving the Eucharist during menstruation, but it doesn't appear to be an official requirement.
Try travelling around the world a bit and see for yourself that there's more than to it than the "american brand" of Christianity. European Catholics are more "lightweight" when it comes to their belief and when science and reason contradicts religion they'll take the science/reason way in 9 out of 10 cases. Orthodox Christians in Eastern Europe and Russia have a similar mindset and and they also take things with a grain of humor (even more than a grain sometimes) and are ok even with making fun of their own beliefs :)
If you generalize a bit, you see that things went down hill since the protestants tried to reform Christianity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Reformation , also, what I call "american brand C." is all a radicalized descendent of protestant reformation), had some mixed good and bad philosophical ideas mixed in with "faith", but mainly managed to take themselves waaaaaaay too seriously!
Mind it, I'm an atheist myself, but C. in not that harmful if not taken too far and it's sometimes good for humor ...now if only people could manage to also take Islam this lightly and look more at its funny sides :)
I'll agree here. The American brand that has spawned the tea party and is super racist is a crazy death cult. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that somewhere there are good Christians. But I just don't see it in my experience with thousands of then in the USA.
It doesn't bother me if someone that thinks the Earth is what...6,000 years old and that someone who is gay is a subhuman thing thinks that I'm the ignorant one. It would be like if an otter thought I wasn't a very nice person. The thing is that I've not seen any evidence of someone who has my set of beliefs willfully causing harm to anyone else. But it's pretty easy to see people willfully harming or contributing to the harm of other people in the name of the good book.
Yeah I know. It's sort of like saying things like millions of people should be treated like shit because somebody in a cave wrote some words in a book thousands of years ago.
Unfortunately yes, and it isn't just in India. Many religions (if the relevant magic texts are followed literally and/or followed by the more aggressive interpretations) consider menstruating women to be a curse upon the world to be shunned until they get their shit together and stop all that bleeding nonsense.
"Women can't visit temples or public places, they're not allowed to cook or touch the water supply".
I've seen educated folks doing this as well, so, sadly yes. It is true. Most women follow it because their mothers/sisters have been doing it. Since it is so common, people tend to accept these superstitions more easily.
If as stated in this article in these regions during menstruation:
1) The woman uses dirt, sand, ash and rags which are never sterilized but just reused month after month.
2) 70% of all pregnancy related medical issues can be tied back to this lack of hygene
Then its not unreasonable to say that the women are unclean in this period and should not have contact with the village water supply... its actually good sense.
It's only "good sense" if, and this is a big if, (a) we have a strict scientific understanding of what we mean when we say "unclean" and (b) we know that we have literally no other way of mitigating this "uncleanliness."
Just as surgeons learned to sterilize themselves and their equipment once they had a scientific understanding of infection, we now have lots of scientific understanding of human menstruation and cleanliness. We should therefor look upon those that insist that women be treated as "unclean" and kept away from the village water supply and temple the same way we'd view a surgeon that insisted that there was no need to wash up before operating.
No one knew scientifically for thousands of years why pigs were unclean. Or shellfish, or 80% of the stuff that was considered 'unclean' food according to the first testament. Now a days there is a particular scientific explanation for it...
traditionally it was the pig rolls around in its own feces, and smells bad, and folks seem to get sick from its meat...
the menstruation situation, its bloody, it smells bad, and the women seem to be in pain when they have it... maybe we should not have them handling or washing their clothing and rags in the communal drinking water does not seem like an irrational conclusion.
Ah I see. You failed to define "village water supply" as an open stream or river.
You also failed to explain why only women are "unclean" in this scenario, since men and animals are also covered in dirt and germs when they bathe. Wouldn't all people and animals be "unclean" then? Seems like the "pretty rational" behavior of keeping women out of the water fails to account for "unclean" men and animals as well.
>Seems like the "pretty rational" behavior of keeping women out of the water fails to account for "unclean" men and animals as well.
I really doubt that they'd let a guy bleeding out everywhere do much of anything either. On a fundamental level, blood has a strong association with injury and sickness for what I think should be obvious reasons.
last time I checked, these rural villagers do not have running water which affects how they bathe, clean clothes, prepare food etc. Add in religious rituals and you have some powerful persuasion to do things in a way that seems backwards to us.
These are the same areas that unfortunately still have honor killings. Regardless, cultural judgements are not an absolute truth, and so other ways, no matter how extreme or foreign, can be tolerated. The frontier that can be helped is hygiene and self-sufficiency. If can start a sexual equality revolution in India, build a bazillion of these machines. A 3d printer as it were.
Actually, he is right. Khap panchayats in the state of Haryana act as a parallel government and sanction honor killings. Recently in a village in Bengal a similar village body ordered a woman to be gang-raped by her fellow villagers.
There's likely global (but unprovable given nature of social science) precedent for this and similar in most every culture where fidelity and virginity were absolute sacred values. Another practice for example, rural villagers in South American will kill you no questions asked if you mess with their daughters. In the US, a "shotgun wedding" had its name for a reason. My grandparents can attest that a couple of my great-grandparents were modern comparatively barbaric farmers (Jeff Foxworthy redneck jokes all the way).
You should also consider the culture these myths create. It forces women to depend on one-another for a significant portion of the time, which, among other things, is a good anti-rape mechanism.
Certainly, these are crazy and superstitious, but given the realities of the times they come from, many of them were a net benefit to their rural society (or have minimal impact) - which is how they've survived to this day.
We have better knowledge now, and we should embrace it, but someone isn't necessarily stupid for following these rules.
I've got to dispute this - India has appalling rates of abuse, rape and mistreatment of women, and I don't believe any systems in place there are helpful. Have you got any citations that might change my opinion?
It is a myth that India has appalling rates of rape. Rape is appalling, but it is fun nowadays to portray India as particularly bad when in reality it is pretty average statistically.[1] For example, rapes per capita: USA (27.3), Sweden (63.5), India (1.8), Canada (1.7). The counter argument generally is that India has lax laws, but to me that is a non-argument.
Following your link :
"This list indicates the number of, and per capita cases of recorded rape. It does not include cases of rape which go unreported, or which are not recorded"
Hey don't you see any reason for a victim of rape to not report her/his aggression?
Once you find one or two, think about how they may influence the results in the US and in India. Does the comparison hold?
You can play blind if you want, don't try to convince others. Your statistics cannot be used for international comparisons.
"Following your link : "This list indicates the number of, and per capita cases of recorded rape. It does not include cases of rape which go unreported, or which are not recorded""
And unreported rapes will be higher in India - much higher - than Botswana (92.9), Panama (28.3), Jamaica (24.4), Belize (6.7) because?
"Your statistics cannot be used for international comparisons."
Glad I was able to bask in your unabashed superiority, testos. Btw, they are not 'my' statistics, which show that Canada has several degrees higher rape incidents that go 'unreported, or which are not recorded' than USA. That data point was left in the comment just for your argument.
I agree to that. But when numbers have limitations we cannot chose to depend on our personal 'hunch'. That was my original objection. That the 'appaling problem in India' is just marketing news and it fits squarely inside 'problem in foreign land' trope.
There are still many taboos around menstruation in India. Women can't visit temples or public places, they're not allowed to cook or touch the water supply - essentially they are considered untouchable.
Every religion has elaborate rules to oppress woman. FYI, the Hebrew Bible has all the same stuff. (So I read in The Year of Living Biblically.)
It's a question of "how literally does society obey those rules?" Will Americans who use the Bible to justify their bigotry against gay people ... also agree to lock up Sarah Palin for five days/month? Not so far.
The rules in the bible are hebrew purity laws, which do not apply to gentiles (as decided in Acts). The verses most often used against homosexuality are not hebrew purity law - they're from St. Paul's letters.
On a school trip 15ish years ago which related to the subject of religion ago we got to a mosque and were then asked if anyone was menstruating. If yes, don't come in. Credit to a male friend of mine, he yelled out that the male next to him was. Its a pity all the males didn't react this way. http://islamqa.info/en/128576
Thank you, quite right. The ongoing fight by (a slowly shrinking segment of) American society to continue blatant persecution of gay people is one of our most shameful failings. And I agree, the Church (big C) is largely responsible.
The Catholic Church teaches against persecution of gay people. From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition
There's also a biblically established protocol for dealing with sinners established by one 'Jesus' in the New Testament. (It starts with a baseline of having a nice civilized dinner with them even if people gossip about it, and continues all the way to laying down your life for their protection if it ever should come to that.)
> Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.
But just discrimination, like trying to stop them marrying someone they love, even in a purely civil ceremony which objectively speaking is none of our damn business -- why, that's just dandy.
There is an active agenda attempting to legally force people to alter their actions to match others beliefs, "persecution" you might call it. Except it's not against those who have sex outside marriage it's against Christians - people who claim to uphold liberty of conscience simply will not allow Christians to express their views on marriage.
Marriage, in Christian terms and historically, is about creating community cohesion in order to provide a firm foundation on which to support the upbringing of children.
No matter how you legally alter the definition of marriage homosexual sexual union doesn't produce children.
All sexual activity outside of marriage is considered sinful within orthodox Christianity based on New Testament exegesis.
Christianity [generally] thus considers that homosexual sex is sinful in the same way as adultery or other pre- or extra-marital sexual activity.
Because you disagree with this analysis and it's foundational axioms doesn't mean you're being persecuted - whether you're an adulterer, a sexual idolater or whatever. It is sinful, you may peacefully respond to that however you like.
FWIW purity laws, ritual uncleanliness, sacrifices and such all ended with the New Covenant. It's a corollary to the very fundamentals of Christian theology; if you don't understand it then you probably have never read the NT and probably have no idea what Christianity is about.
It seems to me that, even if there is sufficient New Testament scripture to infer that any types of sex are sinful that the parts about grace, mercy, love, forgiveness, self-control, being kind, "paying to Cesar what is his", not judging one another and not casting the first stone (just to name a few) would be such high priorities that trying to keep any government laws anywhere in line with Christianity wouldn't even be on the radar.
I had seen this YouTube video of his (TEDx), where he starts with a question "what do you need a meaningful life?" ... and was almost brought to tears when finally he repeats the question and answers it: "So what do you need to lead a meaningful life?"
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'All you need is a Problem.'
> There are still many taboos around menstruation in India. Women can't visit temples or public places, they're not allowed to cook or touch the water supply - essentially they are considered untouchable.
Note that in earlier times getting water in certain region might mean traveling for miles and then bringing water home, which could be pretty heavy. Same is true for cooking, an Indian joint family could be very big (20/25 members). And cooking for the whole family in open fire is not an easy feat either. So most of household work in a big joint family could be extremely strenuous. Some of these traditions let the woman avoid strenuous work during the mensuration.
Though I am speculating here, some of the tradition indeed could be meant for the well being of the woman. It may not be very relevant in the modern world though.
I'm a female founder in the US with a startup that has to do with menstruation, and I cannot even begin to tell you how uncomfortable people (male and female) get when I talk with them about it. For a man in India (where this topic is exponentially more taboo) to undertake a business like this and persist despite the backlash is so incredibly inspiring. The benefit of his business goes so far beyond simply reducing napkin prices...he's helping to break down taboos that exist in India (and across the globe), and giving women opportunities (not to mention more knowledge and confidence about their bodies) that they never would have had otherwise.
Also female with quite a few year experience (please don't let me be 13 again). Many of my circle have moved away from replaceable products in exchange for reusable products, for environmental reasons. But you need very good access to clean and hot water. So there will be another revolution to come, once Tampax loses it's hold.
Very cool! I use cycle for this which only does averaging, which works okay but it's seriously old and clonky. I was wondering why someone hadn't done this already.
Yes...there are plenty of old and clunky apps out there for this =)
We're hoping to change that. I really want this space to become something that men and women, alike, will talk about. Good UI and UX has been missing, and women definitely deserve better.
If your company can put out an Android app that can do everything Ovuview Pro can do and include Google Calendar integration (if I want to share my cycle calendar with my S/O), I'd switch immediately.
This is an amazingly inspiring story, I love the entrepreneurial spirit and dedication of Mr Muruganantham.
However, there is a bigger story hiding behind this personal triumph. It's clear that people living in impoverished areas are not in a position to buy sanitary products at market rates (being sold at a margin of 4000% or more). But for example many do have access to cheap raw materials. It makes a ton of sense to simply make that stuff locally for a fraction of the cost, and with that comes a much greater independence for those poor regions. Let's hope that in time this becomes a trend that expands to many industries.
The article mentions that commercial napkins sold for 4 rupees despite cotton being 1/4000th the cost, but also says farther down that the locally produced ones sell for an average of 2.5 rupees each. That's a 38% discount: significant, but it doesn't seem like a game-changing difference to me. I imagine that if this catches on, the larger manufacturers will likely just cut their margins to compete.
On a more general note, one of the big reasons for the Industrial Revolution's switch to mass-production was that making goods in huge factories is more efficient, and ultimately cheaper, than producing them locally in small quantities. Economies of scale are powerful.
The 2.5 stayed local and made jobs. Its a huge difference. In essence, he gave the locals "permission" to produce these things for themselves.
Wealth disparity is an interesting animal. The rich don't consume 1000's of times more resources than the poor despite having 1000's of times more 'money'. The wealth divide seems to function like an insidious form control wherein the uber-rich are able to deny local markets permission to do things for themselves.
Its great to see when guys like this realize its all just made of paper (literally and figuratively in this case) and they can actually just do it for themselves.
The 2.5 was also subject to inflation (we're talking ~15 years, in a developing nation; that's a lot of inflation). In real terms, it's a huge discount - far in excess of the benefits of keeping some fraction of that for the local economy.
In the meantime, I don't believe the wealthy are exercising a substantial form of control here.
Background: India was without effective sanitary pads for most of human history. Recently, in the past few hundred years or so, some people became fantastically wealthy. At some point, several sanitary pad manufacturers were set up that sold their products, mostly in developed nations and not rural India.
Are you saying wealthy people stopped the people of India from manufacturing their own sanitary pads before this guy came around to the scene? They certainly didn't stop these people after he came around. It looks to me more like there just wasn't anyone who bothered to bring the sanitary-pad manufacturing technology there yet: the wealthy who were interested in the pursuit of money were pursuing easier or more profitable opportunities, and the wealthy interested in making a difference in the world (including those who would just give money away) were unaware of this need.
There are plenty of things that plenty of wealthy people/businesses can/actually do that keep the little man down in plenty of situations. This just... doesn't look like one of them. Poverty is the natural state of Man.
As demonstrated by this article, the uber-rich are not able to deny local markets permission to do things for themselves. The uber-rich simply failed to figure out how to market pads themselves. If Ambani had figured out the marketing, this would just be another story of Reliance incrementally moving into another industry and making a bunch of money.
Trying to paint the uber-rich as some sort of villain here is silly.
The really interesting thing is that this is an example of the value of marketing.
Yeah, it doesn't sound quite right yet to me either. There's no overt mustache-twirling villainy going on here. Its more like a emergent artifact of the system.
Its just interesting to observe a depressed area where everyone is in want, but no one has a "job" to do. The baker can't deliver bread because his truck is broken and then mechanic has no bread so he can't work on trucks. Why? Because neither of them has any "money". Therein is the problem.
It is a giant ponzi scheme, what are you gonna do :|. One of the most expensive things one can own is a house, but the house of a poor person is many times cheaper than the house of a rich person. Add the race to have a bigger house and you have got inflation - just when you start to earn 1000 times more you need to pay 2000 times more if you want to live with people of same status.
38% discount + 10 new jobs per machine. And each additional woman who can now afford to use them, is one more woman who is now more likely to be able to hold down a job or complete school.
I also don't think it's as simple as cutting margins. Note how much of the issue is/was down to social taboos and people being embarrassed about even things like buying them from men in the local shops.
Eventually, sure - as it says in the article he does not see himself as competing with the big manufacturers, but as opening up new markets for them. But if they make inroads it will not not be a bad thing.
My gut feeling is the ripple effects in the local economy is huge. Never mind that this product could probably be produced with less effort at a centralized location - initiatives like these work by both providing a slightly cheaper product and enabling poor people to participate in secondary or tertiary industries.
So in a sense this is an education project on multiple fronts as well. Not just about hygiene and taboos, but also about economics. It's a brilliant illustration that increases in wealth, even from a modest starting point, have large effect. It would be really cool to see this phenomenon studied closer.
World poverty is really just like the Great Depression on a global scale: Lots of quite healthy and able humans which are for some reason (economics, lack of education, lack of communication) unable to participate in global wealth creation. Anything that helps alleviate this problem is a big bonus for humanity.
Never mind that this product could probably be produced with less effort at a centralized location
Transport is a significant cost, even in countries with loads of freeways and autobahns. In the rural areas where these machines are being placed, I imagine the transport infrastructure is particularly poor.
One of the biggest problems with this forum is very narrow minded view of things looking through a limited binoculars of a capitalist culture when everything has to boil down to profit in pure money terms.
What this guy is achieving is more than bringing down the price.
The job he is creating for these women is providing incalculable benefit to themselves, their families, their children and is adding more to the society (which operates on a completely different value system than your own) that can not be calculated in 20 pause less per pad.
Also, you mentioned the scale of economy, but didn't see that he achieved this price reduction without mass scale production which in itself is a big achievement.
Without going in much details, I'd say the capitalist approach does not always benefit the society. I know everybody here is a superstar techie working on the next big social success to allow people do more fluff, other people in other worlds may have different priorities.
>> doesn't seem like a game-changing difference to me
The big difference here is that there is women selling these in private to other women. No man behind a counter. When the women come together about this, it may end up not being such a taboo, and they get advise on how to actually do this. So the game changer here isn't the price, but the community and independence for the women evolving around this product.
This is exactly right. He has broken down a serious taboo already, as these women are now discussing these health issues among themselves. Even beyond that, they are taking it upon themselves to educate and empower other women and girls on these issues. Soon (if not already) the women will start talking about other issues in their community. Think about it: once you've talked about something as private and personal as a menstrual cycle, what other topics are really off-limits?
Also: never underestimate the power of convenience. These sanitary products make it much easier for women and girls to work, go to school, care for their children, and a whole host of other things. Things that make life easier for women have a way of catching on in communities.
and also it's less frightening for a young girl (say, 12 or 13) to purchase from an older woman than an older man. In straight marketing terms, it's great for creating rapport and point of reference.
I would think the decentralised approach would always be able to compete when we factor in transportation costs which usually make up a pretty significant percentage of the actual sales price with centralised mass production. Much more of the money stays in the local economies too.
> I would think the decentralised approach would always be able to compete when we factor in transportation costs which usually make up a pretty significant percentage of the actual sales price with centralised mass production.
For non-perishable goods they are actually much less than people generally think. For a benchmark, shipping t-shirts from Hong Kong to LA in bulk costs less than 5c each. The total transportation costs of a system is completely dominated by the last leg of the route, where things are shipped in the least quantity. Typically, if someone walks half a kilometer to pick a good from a store, the energy cost of that is more than all the transportation costs up to that point, regardless of where the good was made.
Given that, the centralized approach only needs to be a few percent more efficient than the decentralized one to completely bury it. That is usually achievable.
This is true if companies are allowed to externalize costs. Down the line, however, someone's gotta pay the externalities. Usually the future generation. One can delay this, but it will catchup eventually. One manifestation is borrowing assets from an unrealizable future.
This is not to say local loops are externality free, but I conjecture they are more information-efficient and likely to get corrected quicker.
I think looking at the supply-side is the wrong approach. There's probably some factory in China churning out pads for half the cost, absorbing more of the transport cost.
The real genius here is the local factor. We're talking Mary Kay ladies selling sanitary pads. The power of local communities to change behavior and move product is incredible, especially in places where people actually talk to each other. Americans learn about paper towels from TV. If you can't afford a TV, you're talking to people more, and that's a more more valuable channel to engage folks.
End of the day, the product is cheap enough, but there is a powerful incentive to sell, and that's the real magic.
4 rupee price was before, when he first went to buy them. Years passed, and India has crazy amounts of inflation, and now it costs 2.5 rupees. I think if calculated, he probably made somewhat of a 70+% discount or more.
What are the cost of the material + the proportional part of the 10 salaries + other costs?
>* He weighed it in his hand and wondered why 10g (less than 0.5oz) of cotton, which at the time cost 10 paise (£0.001), should sell for 4 rupees (£0.04) - 40 times the price.*
This is the first estimation of the material cost. Then he learned that they use cellulose. And I don't know if it considers the cost of the surrounding cloth or the plastic wrap. Just assume this is accurate and pick a material cost of 0.10 rupees/pad.
> [...] and provides employment for 10 women. They can produce 200-250 pads a day [...]
Assuming a 20 days/month work, we get 500 pads/month/worker. The minimum salary is slightly bigger than ~100 rupees, let's say 0.02 rupees/pad
I don't know the details in India, but tax and retirement founds and security health may add a 50%, that is 0.01 rupees/pad.
> A manual machine costs around 75,000 Indian rupees (£723) - a semi-automated machine costs more.
To recover machine the cost in 5 years, with 60000 pads/year, the result is 0.25 rupees/pad.
> First, a machine similar to a kitchen grinder breaks down the hard cellulose into fluffy material, which is packed into rectangular cakes with another machine.
Well, I don't know the cost of cellulose. Just assume that it's a good approximation to consider the cost of an equivalent amount of cotton instead, as in the first paragraph. [ * ]
Another cost source is the gas to cook the cellulose and the electricity for the light in the building and the building maintenance cost and ... I don't know how to do a good estimation of them, so just forget them.
And don't forget to add taxes.
Then my optimistic cost is 0.38 ruppes/pad and they sell them for 2.5 rupees, so it's a x6.6 margin, instead of a x25 margin.
[ * ] If I'm free to invent numbers, I'd like to double the material cost from 0.1 to 0.2 rupees/pad to consider the changes in the material. Then the total estimation is 0.48 ruppes/pad and the margin reduced to x5.2.
Also, as someone researched below, the price now is between 10-25 R. But as someone else said, I think the involvement of the women in production and distribution is the real game changer.
I also liked his quote that no person dies of poverty, but from ignorance.
> That's a 38% discount: significant, but it doesn't seem like a game-changing difference to me.
That's because it doesn't take into consideration the biggest cost into consideration - the cost of human capital. A larger manufacturer cannot cut down the costs drastically, as the human capital at bigger companies is much larger than a small scale business.
A lot of companies dealing with products like these spend insane money on advertising, marketing and other mechanisms to sell their product. I think Pepsi can sell their drink at 1/10th price if they dropped the ads, sponsorships, marketing etc.
And not to mention. People themselves perceive cheaper products as that of low quality.
Part of their cost is distribution. They have huge machines in central locations that can crank out millions of units, but there is no way they can compete with a machine on site that can already make enough to supply the whole village.
And they would have no choice but to sell them in a shop, which as the article mentioned, are predominantly run by men.
The inventor effectively cut off any chance for a multinational brand to enter this market, because he is selling the people their own manufacturing capital and distribution network, rather than trying to capture all the consumers for himself.
It would be like Microsoft trying to sell Windows 8 on an island where every inhabitant already uses the island's own distribution of Linux, and 10 people in every village contribute to it regularly.
The cotton was 1/40th of the cost: "10g (less than 0.5oz) of cotton, which at the time cost 10 paise (£0.001), should sell for 4 rupees (£0.04) - 40 times the price"
Some economies of scale are attainable with small numbers of (or single) craftsmen. If you can batch operations, one person can rotate though steps of a process over the course of a day, or of days.
Another factor in the Industrial Revolution was the addition of both energy and capital. Where early energy sources were often inconveniently located: mill towns were, literally, located on waterways or elsewhere free energy was possible, often quite distant (and over very poor roads) from major populations, which is to say, either labor or markets.
The revolutions of steam and electricity meant that the scale of operations of factories could be both scaled up and down: smaller-scale equipment means that a local shop can produce goods, though typically this means on a highly specialized basis.
Other factors tend to increase cost of goods: advertising, marketing, and competitive fencing via exclusive marketing arrangements, patent enforcement, and the like.
> It's clear that people living in impoverished areas are not in a position to buy sanitary products at market rates
A study in 2011 said that 70% couldn't afford sanitary napkins [0]. Until 2011 or so, sanitary napkins attracted a 14% luxury tax [1]. They were now reduced to 1%, only after pressure from NGOs.
Very True. There is one point the article missed. Many women now barter sanitary pads instead of paying with money. For example, in some rural areas, women exchange sanitary pads for vegetables from the farmer. IMHO that's amazing and something multinationals cannot do.
Actually, they say so, and mention onion. I think it’s part of the overall decentralised approach that the article mentions, showing brands, but doesn’t entirely cover: price, product bundle, marketing efforts all appear to be locally decided.
Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia identified this a long time ago. His ideal would be that their products are manufactured for the local market (or manufactured locally). However since they also strive to create a sustainable supply chain, and this requires control, it is not currently possible.
I wonder if 'letting go' of the supply chain - regardless of the repercussions - would allow these methods to evolve...
As an Indian, I can see what pain this guy went through. Fighting the society to build a start up like this, with this kind of taboo attached to the product? All the best trying to build a start up at the first place. You are almost treated like you are doing it because you absolutely are incapable of doing anything else.
And having the gumption to fight years of laughter, isolation, mockery and ridicule to only chase what you believe in is a very different thing than just building a company. You are fighting forces that you would do anything to see you fail. And this is beyond the merit of your product.
I salute this guy for not just what he has achieved. Though the margins he achieved will be eventually matched by bigger companies.
In many ways this is like the first man climbing the Everest or first space agency going to the moon. Others have been there after the first attempt. But the people who do it first, face significant obstacles. And they inspire all of us.
I don't know that the bigger companies will achieve the success. This guy's brilliance is in grasping the same economic reality that exists behind open source software, namely that the wider dispersed ownership of the tools one uses to produce things are, the easier it is to achieve long-term success.
I also appreciate this man's efforts. But I slightly disagree with your view point. He never tried to build a startup, he just tried to solve a problem in our society. All these news about businesses and startups corrupted our mind, aren't they?
> He believes that big business is parasitic, like a mosquito, whereas he prefers the lighter touch, like that of a butterfly. "A butterfly can suck honey from the flower without damaging it," he says.
"Luckily I'm not educated," he tells students. "If you act like an illiterate man, your learning will never stop... Being uneducated, you have no fear of the future."
"I would like to call your attention to a super piece of technology, the sailing ship. The sailing ship going through the sea is unlike a bulldozer. The sea closes behind the ship. The ship does no damage to the sea. The sailing ship employs the wind which is swirling ceaselessly around the earth without depleting any of the energy of the universe..." - Buckminster Fuller, from his piece in Alvin Toffler's book The Futurists.
Perhaps, but the difference between butterflies and mosquitoes isn't really in damage to the food (virtually zero in both cases)... it's in the fact that butterflies perform a service (pollination) for the flowers. Mosquitoes quite literally live and die by the lightness of their touch; compare the survival rates of human-feeding mosquitoes (not 100%, but not far off) and human-feeding horseflies (0%).
What a classic Hero's Journey story- man encounters difficulty experienced by his loved one, tries to solve her problem efficiently, loses her in the process, becomes an outcast, persists, finds meaning in his work, receives help, is humble, helps people at an epic scale, reunites with his wife, happy ending, better world, triumph over ignorance and hardship.
While pursuing his entrepreneurial dream, he walked around asking women for their used sanitary pads (while most men struggle to ask for a date), almost gets tied to a tree when a witch doctor incites the local villagers against him, has his wife leave him (only to come back after his success), and even his mother abandoned him; still he goes on.
And then, even after having practically everyone around him ostracize and abandon him, he doesn't go for the money, but remains humble and does the best he can to make the world a better place.
she did not return because of his success, she returned because he was no longer bringing shame upon his family. As the article mentions, there many taboos in their society, there is the caste system that provides separation (even tint of skin can) and of course separation of sexes. So his single minded pursuit made life untenable for her where they lived, it even drove off his own mother. You did note that she merely went back to her mom, she didn't run off with another man. Essentially, she was waiting till he either gave up the pursuit or succeeded, I am quite sure they would be together regardless.
Hell there is odd separation in the states amongst some of the workers from that country. You can see it in the groupings, who has lunch together, those who walk apart or turn down a hall when meeting
No. I am saying there are many levels of separation of society in India, very similar to how separation exists in other cultures. However many Western nations prefer to highlight those faults in other countries and disclaim any such in their own.
That’s how I understood it, possibly like some ‘Chicanos’ in the US tend to have darker skin than ‘White folks’, but not all actually have; is that wrong?
Contrast this grass roots effort with OLPC, a grandiose plan to distribute One Laptop per Child to the third world. The best quip I ever read about that was: "OLPC is a rich man's idea of what poor men need. It's like donating an expresso machine to a homeless shelter."
Instead, as the article makes clear, many poor villages don't even have ready access to clean water. This one humble guy has done more good for more people in India than 1000 grandiose schemes such as OLPC. And he wants to expand to 106 countries. I wish him well.
> Instead, as the article makes clear, many poor villages don't even have ready access to clean water.
Not that tired old argument again. Yes, it is true. But lots also do. And lots have cellular broadband, and tons of relatively poor people have access to smartphones. Not all of the third world is the same.
And looking at the OLPC site now, they're up to 2.4 million of the thing. Not quite the numbers they'd hoped for, perhaps, but still 2.4 million children in developing countries who now have access to computing.
There's room for projects trying to address more than one issue, for more than one group of people.
Also, does your quipper think that women aren't important? I always find it amusing when people wax philosophical about equality whilst retreating into sexist terminology to do so. Instead of 'poor men', 'the poor' or 'poor people' works to the same effect.
I'm aware of all that. I didn't say boo to 'rich man', because it is driven by Negroponte. I recognized the literary device with 'wax philosophical'. It's still someone trying to play the oneupmanship game on equality while at the same time perpetuating sexism. It's a shitty thing to do to merely 'sound cool' - selling out ideals for demagoguery.
English is a wonderfully flexible language and there are a dozen different ways to say the same thing here. Hand-waving away the hypocrisy in that statement as being a more powerful (barely, at that) literary device is just being lazy.
I'd also counter that the proper literary device is 'rich man/poor mAn', not 'rich man/poor mEn'. A small but meaningful difference.
The OLPC wasn't about getting luxury electronics in the hands of the poor, it was about getting them free self-directed education. It was an attempt to leapfrog all of them fundamental problems of poverty by empowering people to do things for themselves.
Similar problem was in communist Czechoslovakia. There was only one factory making hygiene products for entire country, but it burned down on second year of 5 year plan. Central planning committee could not be arsed to change the plan...
I believe TED is not about presenting tech as a "savior."
I believe TED is a sandbox for a number of powerful people to work out their interpersonal arguments about whether tech is good for the world or not. As such you will hear all presentations subtly presented in this light without the participants (presenters nor audience members) being aware. It's essentially a gladiatorial arena funded by the well-to-do, cleverly disguised as another "gee whiz" tech conference.
As such, stories and material are distorted toward arguing the spectral ends of the conference creators.
This is why there are so many stories presented that "make tech look silly, bad or overextended." They're placements by forces within the internal TED conflict that are trying to diminish public opinion about the benefits of technological practice.
Make no mistake- these people are happy to see TED come off as foolish or ruinous, b/c it supports their contingent's goals. They have founded TED with the intention of presenting foolish ideas to tarnish the concept of technology as a practice.
So, the age old advice applies here - take everything with a grain of salt. When you hear a presentation, get what you can out of it, realize it's not the full picture and seek out the missing pieces. Do not rely on TED for a coherent or complete picture of anything. It's just an artifact of debating idealogues.
What is with this ridiculous knee-jerk reaction against anything TED? If that video had been exactly the same except for the TED name, you would've been fine with it. But you've decided TED must be bad, and therefore anything connected with TED is also bad. Lose the silly bias and let good things be good things.
There's a lot to this article. See how the distributed form of production really works, and these sanitary pad machines really aren't that different from open source software. See how they change the world and again, the distributed ownership and small business approach does it.
And additionally, why it is never a good idea to underestimate someone because of a lack of formal education.
I'm so glad this made it to HN. From an Indian societal perspective, what he achieved is just marvellous and outstanding! It takes tremendous courage and determination to do something like this in India! Salute to this man!
"Luckily I'm not educated," he tells students. "If you act like an illiterate man, your learning will never stop... Being uneducated, you have no fear of the future."
Now it's creating employment for women within the villages and being sold for a lower price, while it previously was being mass produced by machinery and sold at a much higher profit margin.
You're right though, to the end consumer it's not that meaningful of a reduction, especially since it is an expense that is only incurred once a month.
I wonder if that was 4 rupees in 1998, vs 2.5 rupees now? According to an online inflation calculator, 1 rupee in 1998 is worth 4 rupees now, so the difference would be more like 16:2.5.
Perhaps someone could check an online Indian Amazon equivalent, not that such a place would be available to rural women anyway, but it would give a lower baseline.
Branded pads retail range Rupees 10-25 per pad - some variation in capacity. So the contemporary ratio ranges from 4:1 to 10:1. So 16:2.5 is good estimate even for contemporary comparison!
@pja you are hereby awarded 1 Fermi (see recent link on the topic of Fermi estimates).
The saving is significant because one can also buy shampoo in sachets that cost Rs.5, so the savings expand access to a range of basic hygiene products.
Plus reduction in medical problems and mortality and an increase in productivity.
I'm also not clear to what extent the mass-produced pads were actually available. He seems to have started out in a populated area with several villages and a significant town nearby. In more rural areas, was there even someplace you realistically could buy them?
Well and people are making them locally in their villages and colleges instead of buying international, and mostly women at that. I know American cities that are always struggling to keep mom and pop shops alive vs. the big boxes. Meanwhile everyone says Japan's only hope to keep their labor pool growing against their greying population is to start getting women involved. So he pulled off something America and Japan are struggling with.
> Meanwhile everyone says Japan's only hope to keep their labor pool growing against their greying population is to start getting women involved.
I was under the impression that as women join the workforce their fertility plummets. This seems incredibly counterproductive if the problem is a "greying population"?
I heard it was education that correlated negatively with fertility. Although education and careerism go hand in hand, I think the difference is still huge.
He is also increasing the local velocity of money. That 2.5 rupees is re-spent locally, aside from the cost of imported cellulose boards. 4 rupees spent on an import would exit, aside from the shopkeeper markup, and would not return, except as payment for exports.
The velocity of money effectively increases the availability of money. It isn't so much how many coins you have, but how often each one gets spent. If you buy from someone who hires and spends locally, that money is more likely to come back around to you faster than if you buy from someone who spends or saves it somewhere else. And that distance isn't just as the crow flies, but also psychological distance. Thus, as a software writer, I should prefer to buy from companies that spend a lot on software, even if they don't ever pay me directly. It makes more sense for me to shop at Amazon or Wal*Mart than somewhere that figures the sales excise with a desk calculator, and better for me to patronize such a business in my own town than one just like it 500 miles away.
So it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, exactly. But trying to adjust the numbers to gauge the true economic impact of this invention would take about 3 more economists than I currently keep in my back pocket.
I understand the difference is considerably larger taking inflation into account (the first price was more than 10 years ago). But more than that, he's opening up sanitary pads to public discussion and reducing the taboo, which brings them to women who previously wouldn't have bought them at any price.
And of course he's also creating jobs for women and helping rural communities be more self-sufficient. There's so much more happening here than just discount products.
I have read a lot on the subject of how civil rights and the rule of law allowed the emergence of the Industrial Revolution, and this story reminds of that earlier epoch. As late as the 1670s, England was still burning witches (male and female) at the stake, to punish them for their witchcraft. But then Newton publishes Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 brings in a new regime, the English Bill of Rights of 1689 ensures everyone a trial if they are accused, everyone has civil rights, and suddenly, among the legal and intellectual elites, it becomes widely understood that witchcraft does not actually exist, everything can be explained by science, and people doing weird stuff need to have their civil rights protected. And by the early 1700s men like Jethro Tull and Charles Townsend kick off the Agricultural Revolution, doing weird stuff like feeding turnips to cows and collecting all the manure -- spooky weird stuff that might have gotten them accused of witchcraft just 30 years earlier.
And this story reminds of that earlier epoch. When you bring in real innovation (innovation that touches upon people's profoundest taboo's and fears) you either have civil rights, or you end up dead. And it does say something hopeful about India that this man knew his basic civil rights were going to protect him from accusations of witchcraft. Though, of course, this part suggests that India could still improve its protections quite a bit:
"Worse was to come. The villagers became convinced he was possessed by evil spirits, and were about to chain him upside down to a tree to be "healed" by the local soothsayer. He only narrowly avoided this treatment by agreeing to leave the village. It was a terrible price to pay. "My wife gone, my mum gone, ostracised by my village" he says. "I was left all alone in life.""
"He fashioned a sanitary pad out of cotton and gave it to Shanthi, demanding immediate feedback. She said he'd have to wait for some time - only then did he realise that periods were monthly. 'I can't wait a month for each feedback, it'll take two decades!'"
Sounds like he got a pretty solid biology lesson along the way.
I am from north India and agree that menstruation is still taboo in our culture (mostly in villages).
-During menstruation cycle women (mostly married) sleep in separate room, they are not supposed to touch anything and after 4 days all the clothes/bedding they wear/use (even mattress) will be washed.
-Most of these rules are tied to religion.
-I think when these "rules" were started there were no sanitary pads, so may be this was done for hygiene sake, but today it doesn't make any sense. And I think in those days if someone wanted people to follow anything just say its required by your religion and people will blindly follow.
-This guy is doing really great work, happy that BBC picked it up.
I'm a bit tired of most of the taboos/problems of India being "mostly in villages". My entire family are city dwellers and every time there is an commercial for sanitary napkins on TV, the women have an expression of embarrassment and can't wait for it to get over (whereas scenes of violence from the movies are received perfectly fine).
The next time someone complains about how hard startups are, show them this. Until you've walked around with a soccer ball full of goat's blood in your pants, after your wife and mother have abandoned you, you have nothing to complain about.
"Until you've walked around with a soccer ball full of goat's blood in your pants, after your wife and mother have abandoned you, you have nothing to complain about."
I really enjoyed this story and remember first hearing about him a few years ago. Truly inspiring man.
It makes me wonder, how many other people are out there who have the same passion for something, but haven't had any success? Only a select few will have success, most will fail. I think we should celebrate the people who took risks and failed too. But sadly you won't find articles written about them as it isn't a happy ending like this one.
While this man seems amazing and has done a great thing for a lot of women, it's a shame that the main problem still remains. Menstruation is still taboo, both in the west and in India.
It would be nice if instead of importing the western method of dealing with it (using sanitary pads to dispose of our menstrual blood secretly and in the process creating mountains of rubbish - where do all the blood-stained "sanitary" napkins go?) the women could just wash their cloth pads and dry them in the sun. It seems quite terrible environmentally.
I'm a woman and grew up using disposable menstrual products. I only started using reusable ones when I was thirty because I have endometriosis that causes heavy bleeding (so I have to use postpartum type pads) and it weighed on my mind to be throwing them out all the time. Now I feel terrible about all those years. I don't need to wash them in hot water because it's sunny where I live. But I hide the bucket that I soak them in and I hang them out when my husband is not at home so he doesn't have to see them. Thankfully, I don't have to be so secretive about our baby's nappies.
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.
- Apple Inc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Different
> "You always have a girl in white jeans, jumping over a wall," he says. "They never talk about hygiene."
Look's like the marketing folks at P&G were selling this stuff to the mostly affluent. Therefore, I am guessing they never bothered to sell the hygiene angle.
I see a lot of comments discussing the cost. I do not think cost (or profits) were the driver. Surely higher cost make it difficult for poor to acquire the pads but the taboo is a much bigger hurdle to cross, which this gentleman has amazingly addressed.
Or you just get menstruation cups? Might be a bit more expensive initially but cheaper longterm and a lot more environmentally friendly. http://www.ruby-cup.com/en/
I know two women who have tried those. In both cases they tried for several months to get used to them, but they gave up eventually because they're so unpleasant to use, and it never gets any easier. Apparently.
There are women who find that menstrual cups aren't for them, but in my experience, they tend to be the exception. Using one myself, and having turned many of my friends onto them, they're generally hailed as the greatest thing ever invented around here. Not to say theres anything wrong with your friends, because everyone likes what they likes, just wanted to throw my own experience.
Using one myself and best thing I've ever tried! Takes some practice but once you got the hang of it it works great. But think it's different from woman to woman!
I feel like most of the university-educated young women I know use Diva Cups or Keepers (and many don't mind talking about them and promoting them to others or I wouldn't know that). I think their usage really depends on local culture, social norms, propensity to shop in organic grocery stores where they are often sold, etc.. The first women I knew who used them started in the early nineties.
Cups seem a lot more expensive, you can buy almost 700 sanitary pads for the retail price of 1 ruby cup ($28 ~ 1735 rupees). Also, the pads are more available and create jobs for women in rural areas because they are produced and sold locally.
If the subject is so shameful and taboo that the women mentioned in this article can't even dry their sanitary rags in the sun, do you really see them boiling a menstrual cup in the family's cooking pot once a month to sterilize it?
As a loud supporter for menstrual cups, and someone who is admittedly not that familiar with Indian culture, I can see there being a large cultural barrier towards adoption of menstrual cups, as they require you to get, well, a little up close and personal with your own body. Even in the US, I know a few people that are completely uncomfortable with the idea and won't use menstrual cups or tampons without applicators (or tampons at all).
The optimal technical solution to this problem, for the vast majority of the population, is menstrual cups. They are completely reusable and generally perform better.
To me the long term challenge is the social problem of convincing people that menstrual cups are not gross and are not going to hurt them.
I totally respect this guy for finding an intermediate solution that helps his community though. I don't live in India so I have no idea what the specific cultural challenges are.
Don't know about that. From talking with my wife they are very messy and need to be cleaned a lot or they smell, like boiled every day or two - so that's why there are disposable ones and they are more popular. Also you need a lot of clean tissues each time you insert, rinse, and replace it - which brings you right back to the using dirty rags again cause there is stigma to clean and dry them properly in those cultures. Anyway her ob/gyn told her to stop using them when she got a IUD, and that's another issue with them.
My wife has had a different experience; she reports she's quite happy with hers and it requires less maintenance than alternatives. Of course, this is a very small sample size, a second hand report, and, of course, still surrounded by all the attendant larger issues....
It sounds like your wife is the kind of person who wants her body to be completely free of any sort of body smells and doesn't want to come in contact with any kind of body fluids. Those are exactly what I was referring to when I said there is cultural resistance. My community are "pro-natural" and don't have issue with the smell, nor do they use tissues. They just use their hands and believe that vaginas and menstrual fluid have scents and that it's ok. It's just cultural differences.
Erik, please do not make assumptions about my wife, she is far less bothered by ick than me or many people I know. Smell can be caused by bacteria, can be different than scent you refer to, and bacteria are a real concern so to clean the cup well and to have clean hands and area there are in fact very important. She used cup for years (due to heavy flow - cup easily contains more than tampon/pad absorbs well in practice - a pro of cup), then after we had all our children she had IUD for contraceptive and at that point her ob/gyn said the two are not supposed to be used in concert, so she stopped using cup. The IUD also lessened her flows so the reason for using the cup for her was removed as well. I thought I was completely polite and simply listed some reasons why a cup may not be appropriate in India where just washing and drying rags well in comparison is a concern according to the BBC article.
> He believes that big business is parasitic, like a mosquito, whereas he prefers the lighter touch, like that of a butterfly. "A butterfly can suck honey from the flower without damaging it," he says.
While I don't believe that big business is necessarily parasitic, I love this metaphor.
The main problem is inhumane inequality. All of these "developing nations" are poor because they are oppressed and excluded by the financial powers. "Developing nation" is a racist term that attempts to cover economic neglect and oppression.
This is something that makes me both proud and sad about my home country India. We are still struggling with some of the basic problems that the developed world probably solved 100 years back. It makes me even more sad that just 60 years back India was hardly behind any other developed country.
Arunchalam's example is also a classic case of how Indian government has destroyed India's entrepreneurial zeal. When Arun introduced his cheap sanitary pad making machine, Indian government woke up and see an opportunity to gain votes of poor and goodwill of large companies.
Indian government came up with a scheme where poor women will get a "fixed" quota per month of sanitary pads paid for by tax payers.
---
Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MHFW) is set to embark upon an ambitious programme, reports The Hindu on 21st February 2010, to reach about 200 million women with 100 sanitary pads per person per annum with a budget of some INR 20 billion in next 3 to 6 months.
-- [Source: One of the email threads I was exchanging on this matter with a friend in government]
This is another Indian government scam where big companies like Johnson and Johnson etc. will provide these pads at taxpayers cost to the poor women while politicians will take their cut. Going by past experience even the pads wont reach the women.
Those who might be aware of India's economic history, it is full of such scams. Indian government often ran government sponsored health campaigns claiming things like
- "Wash your hands with soap after and before having food and going to toilet else it will will cause diseases."
- "Use iodized salt in food else your children will be born retarded".
- "Use toothbrush and toothpaste"
The reality is, even in rural areas the level of hygiene is way better. People used handmade soaps and herbal alternatives for soap. (Even I used them in my childhood). During my childhood oral hygiene involved brushing teeth with 5 different types of leaves, gargling with hot water mixed with a mixture of 15 different kind of powders which were comprised of different kind of tree skins, herbs and roots. My father still knows the formula and I used it successfully when I developed a gum related infection.
And you know what? Indians used plenty of sea salt in their food. We ate salted fish, Salted Pickles and what not.
Today it so happens that all these small scale industries are already dead. Not because they failed to innovate or compete on price. (In reality some companies like Vico succeeded with these traditional products) They failed because government actively tried to kill them in the name of public welfare.
Today I am buying a Colegate toothpaste which claims to contain "sea salt". The TV ad of this toothpaste shows a grandpa showing his grandson that his teeth are stronger at 80 purely because he used sea salt to brush his teeth in past. There are other companies out there which are selling toothpastes claiming to contain the exact same herbs that we used in past (Miswaak, Babool etc.)
When I visit Target and Wallmart I often see shelves full of crudely packaged soaps titled "Handmade Soap" selling at 3x the price of normal soap.
I feel sad for Arunachalam and many other people I know who are mad just like him because rest of us Indian citizens have failed to make a political choice which would have heralded these men as heroes.
Unsolicited Advice to Americans: I see American government taking same direction as that of Indian government in past and present. Pushing private interests of few in the name of poor. Buying votes by redistribution of wealth while wrecking incentives to be innovative. I might be wrong. But there is no cost to being cautious.
Though the government is pretty corrupt, you seem to be paranoid in your criticism of it.
> "Use iodized salt in food else your children will be born retarded".
"In India, the entire population is prone to IDD due to deficiency of iodine in the soil of the subcontinent and consequently the food derived from it. To combat the risk of IDD, salt is fortified with iodine. However, an estimated 350 million people do not consume adequately iodized salt and, therefore, are at risk for IDD. Of the 325 districts surveyed in India so far, 263 are IDD-endemic."[1]
> People used handmade soaps and herbal alternatives for soap.
Handmade soaps are fine. The ads never said you should only use big-brand soaps. Just because it's called "herbal alternative", it does not mean that it is effective. Each family or each region has its own "herbal alternative". Are you saying that they are all as effective as soap?
> 5 different types of leaves, gargling with hot water mixed with a mixture of 15 different kind of powders
I have visited villages for various reasons. Most people I came across used one of three methods: neem twigs, salt, charcoal ash. Neem has some antimicrobial properties, but those who cleaned with salt were ruining their teeth. I doubt that ash benefited their oral hygiene. I dare say these villagers are better off with modern products.
> The reality is, even in rural areas the level of hygiene is way better.
Better than what? If you're comparing villages to urban slums, sure. Are you forgetting that in villages, most people crap out in the open? And don't using soap afterwards? And did you read this article about women not using sanitary pads?
Thanks for the link. We think it is difficult to see from the point of view of our users. This guy proved quite the contrary. One of the best stories I've ever read here.
Why use washable rags when you can use a diva cup?
I suspect the answer is the same in both cases: lack of clean water and effective sterilization methods. If you wash your rags in dirty water and do not expose them to the sterilizing UV rays of direct sunlight, you're giving yourself infections. The machine uses a UV light to sterlize, and does not require a reliable water supply.
When every village in India has access to ample amounts of clean-from-the-tap water, they may choose to revisit their current solution.
I'd also imagine regular washing such rags in overcrowded areas with an absence of infrastructure can cause issues - as would it be in places where people (mainly women) need to spend a significant amount of the day just to get hold of water.
Arunachalam Muruganantham is a hero. I use that word in its full magnitude. Since I am now an expert on the matter, having read the entire article, I'll speculate on what motivates this man:
- Grit. Crazy amounts of grit. The article is full of good quotes, but my favorite is what he said after being abandoned by his mother:
"It was a problem for me," he says. "I had to cook my own food."
- Humility combined with hunger:
"Luckily I'm not educated," he tells students. "If you act like an illiterate man, your learning will never stop... Being uneducated, you have no fear of the future."
"Every time he comes to know something new, he wants to know everything about it," [his wife] says.
- Love of humanity, on some level at least:
"Anyone with an MBA would immediately accumulate the maximum money. But I did not want to. Why? Because from childhood I know no human being died because of poverty - everything happens because of ignorance."
As an aside, I LOVE the picture of his wife and daughter toward the end. This one photograph lends better context to the story than all the others combined. I know a single picture means nothing, but the look in his daughter's eyes makes me think she'll inherit something of her dad's baddassness.
And as another aside, bloody god-damn fucking hell, are the following bits really true?
There are still many taboos around menstruation in India. Women can't visit temples or public places, they're not allowed to cook or touch the water supply - essentially they are considered untouchable.
There are also myths and fears surrounding the use of sanitary pads - that women who use them will go blind, for example, or will never get married.