Rahala - Coimbatore

We reached Coimbatore on the 6TH. It’s been an amazing experience, definitely unforgettable one. This is not my first time in south India, but never really got to see the real culture and hospitality of this region. The culture, food, people, clothing everything is very different compared to the northern region.
Some of the differences that I saw was that the women here were much more soft-spoken than men. In all the other colleges that we visited it seemed that the men were much louder, much more willing to interact with us. One of the college’s that we visited was GIM, they planned a whole day event for us. Starting from the Pongal festival, which is a harvest festival celebrated only in this state. It then continued on to some more traditional dances, conference, and also having lunch on banana leaf. During the conference we presented our views on women empowerment in India along with the other students and faculty members. The presentations here showed very similar problems that we saw in the presentations in northern India. The emphasis was on how women need to be educated so that they can make informed decisions, the discriminations and stereotypes that women face, and how to overcome those.
We also went to an ashram that works primarily for women empowerment; there we met with Dr Veenu who was the in charge. We had a few presentations on how the self help groups (all women run) are giving jobs to women, making them independent entrepreneurs, and at the same time helping run their own families. As Dr. Veenu said educate women and that will educate the whole family.