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Chhavi Rajawat's next aim: do away with mrityu bhoj

The custom entails organising large meals for relatives, friends, and acquaintances from all across, who come to pay condolence at someone's death.

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Chhavi Rajawat
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Chhavi Rajawat needs no introduction. One of the youngest woman sarpanch in the country, and the first with an MBA degree, she has been consistently working for the betterment of her village Soda in Tonk district of Rajasthan. Clean drinking water, education, empowerment of women, and bridging the man-woman divide topped her agenda when she was elected to power in 2011. Now in her second tenure, the 37-year-old has trained her guns at the age old custom of mrityu bhoj.

Talking to DNA on the sidelines of The Bespoke Woman, a day-long workshop organised in Pullman Novotel, Aerocity, on Wednesday, which aims to enable women to dwell in an existence with a high happiness quotient, Rajawat shared how mrityu bhoj is an unnecessary social practice that proves to be more a burden than anything else. The custom entails organising large meals for relatives, friends, and acquaintances from all across, who come to pay condolence at someone's death.

"I have seen farmers, who can ill-afford even two square meals a day, struggling to hold mrityu bhoj, because 'samaj ki pratha hai'. It is an expensive affair because you are feeding a huge gathering. It pained me to find we are still stuck in time warp, so much so that poor people also take loans at times to perform this," she said. To discourage this practice, she is using her most potent weapon: dialogue. "I visit grieving families but consciously refuse to partake in the mrityu bhoj. I even return it if it is sent to my place. I tell them that they do not have to do it just because that is how it has been for centuries. I try to reason with them — that we constitute the samaj or society and only we can bring about a change," the former Lady Shri Ram College alumna said.

During the conversation, the denim-clad sarpanch of a village where ghoonghat is still the norm, also spoke about how her journey has not been free from battling patriarchy. Recounting her struggle to get things done because she is a woman and on top of it 'single', Rajawat is nonchalant and honest at the same time, "An officer sitting across the table is not used to an assertive and much younger woman, getting things done. It makes him insecure. The same insecurity runs in grass root polity too, who see me as a threat. I have had instances where welfare projects for Soda were deliberately stalled because, I, a woman was at the helm of affairs."

The Bespoke Woman brought together women from business, arts, cinema, lifestyle, sports and politics, who spoke on the need gap between 'being a woman' and handling the pressures of living in an 'HNI society'. Among the speakers were famous model Carol Gracias, BJP leader Neera Shastri, Chhavi Rajawat.

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