MELINDA  GATES

The Moment  Of Lift by Melinda Gates ;  Published by Bluebird Books; Pages 273 ; Price Rs.599/-   

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All of us are aware that the richest and most benevolent couple in the world today is Bill Gates and Melinda Gates.Their Foundation has been munificent in helping the world's poor and downtrodden.

The book under review is the very first book from  Melinda Gates and it is a stirring call to action for women's empowerment.

Melinda Gates is co-chairperson of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and her aim has been to find solutions for people with the most urgent needs, wherever they live. She declares loud and clear “ If you want to lift a society up, invest in women.”

The lift-off analogy to define earthshaking change for the better comes from Melinda’s childhood. She was one of four children of a stay-at-home mom and an aerospace engineer dad who worked on the Apollo programme and grew up watching more than one lift-off, when the engines ignite, the earth shakes and the rocket takes off. The moment of lift is when the forces pushing us up overpower the forces pulling us down and that’s when we are free to fly. After getting her master’s degree, Melinda turned down a job offer from IMB, where she had worked for several summers, to take a job at a “smallish company called Microsoft”. She spent nine years there and eventually became the general manager of information products. “Today I work in philanthropy, spending most of my time searching for ways to improve people’s lives… and often worrying about people I will fail if I don’t get it right. I’m also the wife of Bill Gates. We got married on New Year’s Day in 1994. We have three children,” .

Melinda had the choice of having a career, of being a stay-at-home mom, of later being a mix of the two, and then getting back to a career because she had the opportunity to choose what she wanted to study, whom to marry, when and how many children to have, and when to quit her job because, as she puts it modestly, “We were in the fortunate position of not needing my income.”

Melinda traces her awakening to the link between women's empowerment and the health of societies. She shows some of the tremendous opportunities that exist right now to “turbo-charge" change. And she provides simple and effective ways through which each one of us can make a difference.

Convinced that all women should be free to decide whether and when to have children, Gates took her first step onto the global stage to make a stand for family planning. That step launched her into further efforts: to ensure women everywhere have access to every kind of job; to encourage men around the globe to share equally in the burdens of household work; to advocate for paid family leave for everyone; to eliminate gender bias in all its forms.

Throughout, Gates introduces us to her heroes in the movement towards equality, offers startling data, shares moving conversations she's had with women from all over the world—and shows how we can become part of it.

A personal statement of passionate conviction, this book tells of Gates' journey from a partner working behind the scenes to one of the world's foremost advocates for women, driven by the belief that no one should be excluded, all lives have equal value, and gender equity is the lever that lifts everything.

Melinda Gates is working harder than ever to make the world more equitable by empowering women and providing them with opportunities and services to end poverty.

Melinda Gates has played a big role in India. Her second visit to India was to Sonagachi in Kolkata .She ensconced herself on a mat on the terrace of a kuchcha home of a sex worker she met in Kolkata’s biggest red light area. She wanted to find out how her Foundation’s US$338 million HIV-prevention project called Avahan was empowering women, mostly female sex workers, to say no to unprotected sex and gender violence.

The lessons from her later trips to India are a part of Melinda’s growth from a co-chair working behind the scenes to becoming one of the world’s biggest champions of women’s rights.

Among the heroines is Ruchi, then 20, from Shivgarh in Uttar Pradesh, an upper-caste girl who defied community ridicule to save a low-caste newborn from dying of hypothermia by nestling him against her breasts after his family refused to do so fearing he was possessed by evil spirits.

There are several heart-wrenching accounts too, like Champa’s helplessness on being refused permission to get her two-year-old daughter Rani treated for acute malnutrition at the government’s free centre because she was needed at home to cook for her husband’s family. Rani was saved because the village health-workers got her treated while her mother stayed home to cook.

Melinda makes you twinge in pain when she writes “Beyond our conversations, what stuck me most about Gita and the other women I met was how much they wanted to touch and be touched. Nobody in the community touched a sex worker except to have sex with her. No matter what caste they are from, they are untouchable. For them, touching is acceptance.... a few of the women started singing the civil rights anthem ‘We shall overcome’ in Bengali-accented English, and I started to cry... For me, the contrast between their determination and their dire circumstances was both inspiring and heartbreaking.”

The book is full of honest personal accounts of what made her choose the road less travelled, including the tough decision to become a public advocate for family planning, a political and religious time bomb in many parts of the world.

Melinda Gates writes that her first major step as a public advocate was with their family planning initiatives. Through their work with vaccinations, they’d learned that when women were in charge of their reproductive health it allowed them to space pregnancies and control the number of children they had, resulting in healthier children and families. “It took us years to learn that contraceptives are the greatest life-saving, poverty-ending, women-empowering innovation ever created,”

The contraceptive battle marked “just the beginning” in her work for women. She realized that gender equity — getting girls to school, letting women run their own businesses — would be essential to lifting women up.

Of course, Melinda faced severe criticism from the Catholic Church for her espousing Contraceptives. They have called her “..former Catholic Melinda Gates” and “...so-called Catholic Melinda Gates.” Melinda declares,     “I feeI am following the higher teaching of the Church.”

Travelling and talking with women about family planning and contraceptives laid bare many more of the worst atrocities women face worldwide: Female genital cutting, child marriage, rape, domestic violence, unpaid labor, sex work. Gates’ stories of meeting these women are heartbreaking but necessary reading. Extreme poverty and isolation is devastating to women and makes it almost impossible for them to provide for and protect their children. As a result, the cycle of abuse and poverty continues.

She also openly acknowledges the head starts, good luck and privilege that has helped both her and Bill succeed. There is an authenticity to both Melinda and Bill’s need to learn more about the “why’s” and their wish for positive, peaceful change that resonates in every chapter.

We learn a lot about the education, work history and ethos of Melinda Gates whose voice is unique voice in the worldwide struggle for female empowerment. 

This book is for anyone struggling to find a place in the world and the strength to help others and transform oneself.

P.P.Ramachandran.

13/10/2019.