For these supermoms, management is like child’s play

AHMEDABAD: Going back to school with her 20-month-old daughter Aishanee was definitely not an easy decision for 30-year-old Sanghamitra Chakravarty. But after nine years in TCS, Delhi, she needed to expand her perspective to climb the corporate ladder. Three months back, she joined the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad’s coveted PGPX (Post Graduate Programme in Management for Executives).

Today, in her apartment at the institute's new campus, one finds Sanghamitra singing lullabies while strategising for a complex CISCO case study.

The days when an Indian woman would renounce an ambitious career for motherhood are gone. Completing a successful PGPX term at the IIM-A are three young mothers, each with a kid not older than three years.

The 'supermoms', as their peers call them, have jettisoned conventional norms of wilting under social pressure and turned demanding joint families and in-laws into their strength.

In an average age group of 29-32, most flaunt an average 9.8 years of work experience. Sanghamitra and Samyuktha Surendran, another PGPX student at IIM-A, have their mothers and mothers-in-law coming over alternately to take care of the kids as they study for 18 hours a day. Thirty-two-year-old Lakshmi Kumar's parents-in-law have moved in from Trivandrum for the duration of the course to help with her three-year-old son.

"Most women get stuck at middle level management as by their mid-twenties, there is tremendous social pressure to 'settle down'. Most succumb and make do with just a cushy job rather than pursuing a focused career. But now, as the Indian economy surges, the Indian woman is not going to be happy with standing in the sidelines," Sanghamitra says, adding that only five women in this PGPX batch of 61— i.e., less than 10 per cent—pretty much resemble India Inc's top management today.

Lakshmi quit her five-year-old job with a retail company in Moscow and 29-year-old Samyuktha chose to study over a steady job with a consulting firm in Chennai. "The pedagogy is excellent, but extremely demanding and hectic. We sometimes have guilt pangs about whether we are doing the right thing. But to stay abreast in the corporate world, we will be increasingly doing this smart juggling," Samyuktha said.

If their husbands couldn't join, a long distance relationship was not a tough decision. "My husband is still in Moscow, he couldn't have taken a break for a year," said Lakshmi. Samyuktha's husband is in Chennai, pursuing a law practice while Sanghamitra's husband is continuing with TCS in Singapore.

Coordinator of the PGPX course Prof G Raghuram told DNA that they did realise it could initially be tough for the women, but they are not disappointed as the response for the next batch is even better. "The ladies are very courageous and are doing a phenomenally good job. We find absolutely no difference in their commitment or performance vis-à-vis their male counterparts. We strongly encourage more women to join the course," he said.