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Draw, dance, dream: The stereotype-busting newsletter for boys
In his newest project, activist Rajat Mittal — co-founder of Menstrupedia — tells the story of men who defied restrictive gender norms to find joy.
Rajat Mittal used to love to dance and draw. But he gave both up, largely because they weren’t considered boyish pursuits. When Mittal had his first child, a boy, it got him thinking.
The civil engineer has been involved in gender sensitisation projects for a while, co-founding a menstruation awareness project called Menstrupedia in 2012 and contributing to books such as Menstrupedia Comic: The Friendly Guide to Periods for Girls (2014), and She Can You Can: The A-Z Book of Iconic Indian Women (2020), the latter written by his wife Garima Kushwaha.
When they had their son, two years ago, Mittal says he found himself sitting in their home in San Francisco, thinking about how gender stereotyping might someday affect his boy too. “I decided to address this in my next project,” he says.
Rather than a book, Mittal decided to produce a free digital monthly newsletter in the form of an 11-part essay series called Boyish. In Boyish, Mittal tackles stereotypes that Indian boys still face, by telling the story of one successful individual who defied them (each story is also illustrated beautifully by artist Ajin Mohan).
“I wanted to do things in a self-published model. A book would be very hard for me to make sustainable. So I decided to build up an audience first, with a newsletter,” says Mittal, 36.
So far, since January, Mittal has interviewed ballet dancer Manish Chauhan, cartoonist Pran and Zumba instructor Mohsin Syed. Coming up are a male makeup artist, a nurse, a belly dancer and a poet, among others.
“I debated just putting these stories up on a blog or a website. But the format of an email is a little more personal and intimate. It also allows me to know my readers better, allow my readers to really reflect on each essay, and the feedback has been wonderful,” Mittal says. “People share their own experiences. For example, on the Zumba story, one of the readers wrote back to me that he actually tried doing some Zumba and quit, because he was literally the only guy in the room.”
Syed, 30, the Zumba trainer, says the feedback he received was wholesome and reaffirming too. “I was born in an orthodox Muslim family. I was a very good student, but my first love was dance,” Syed adds. “I was always offered the role of the girl, in our all-boys school. I suffered a lot of bullying for that. And because of my upbringing, I studied finance and worked with major investment-banking brands in India and the US.”
One day five years ago, he realised this was “just not who I am” and returned to India and to dancing. His family and friends were not pleased. There was a lot of pressure, Syed says, to return to his career in finance. “When my story came out, a lot of people reached out to me. But what mattered most was that my mom, who is very orthodox and had stopped talking to me for at least a month when I quit my job and took up dancing, reached out and said she was proud of me,” Syed says. “That was my best gift… I’m in a happy place now.”
