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My First Tryst With Family Business Sabotaged By Patriarchy

Didn't I deserve a chance if I was inexperienced? Was it not my responsibility to understand and grow the family business? If parents themselves take away a daughter's right on the family business, how will gender equality flourish in families? 

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Rudrani Gupta
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women and property ownership, stigma around depression, feminism, Mental Health Is Important, Homesickness In COVID-19
My first tryst with the family business: I never thought this would be a reality in my life. Like every daughter in Indian society, I used to think that family business is inherited by the sons of the house. My parents even made us clear about it by naming a property under my brother’s name.
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However, they took a step forward and allowed me to handle that property while I was on a mental health break from my job as a writer. But their step towards creating a gender-neutral family went back when they sabotaged my attempts to hold the ground in the field of the family business.

Business, as I learnt in a few days, is all about risks, patience and money. You have to take risks that might be at the cost of the financial wellbeing of the entire family. You need the patience to see your business run because if you hasten you will trip and hit the rock bottom of depression, loss and hopelessness. And money of course is the pivot of any business. You value money more than the emotions of yourself or the customers.

I am not sure whether these learnings were good or bad part of running a business. But I did understand that there is a good and a bad ways to run a business. You can either be honest towards your customers and patiently wait for the result of your good deeds. Or you can be cunning by using lies and tricks that compromise your sense of morality but gains you enough money. And my strategy for the business was the first one. I never learnt to manipulate or converse with customers. My policy was to sell not to enforce a customer to buy.

But in this article, I am not going to talk about whether my strategy failed or succeeded. But I am going to expose the patriarchy that never gave my strategy a chance to work.

The first day when I joined the business, I was scared. I never learnt anything about family business or business in general. I was unaware of strategies and plots that a business mind weaves. But still, I was happy that my parents gave me a chance and I wanted to make full use of it. I started working, planning and learning stuff from the scratch. But the first attempt of sabotaging my efforts was done by a male staff, also our relative, working at the property. He never let me deal with the customers on my own. He used to cut me out of the conversations with the customers and treated me like a child who doesn’t understand anything.

This is a quite common experience for women who join male-dominated fields. They are infantilised despite their degrees and knowledge. Men are valued and paid more than women despite being equal in every term. But if society will never let a woman take the lead, how will she ever be the leader? If the male staff never let me deal with the customers, how would I ever learn how to handle business?

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Moreover, all my attempts to strategise and organize things in my way was not valued and the male staff went on with his own managerial skills without giving me a chance to make changes.

But since he was a relative and a man, I didn’t feel confident enough to confront him for sabotaging me. There was an inbuilt fear and diffidence that made me question myself and not the staff. “Maybe I am not doing it well”, “Maybe he knows better” is all my mind was full of.

But I realized that I was not wrong after a particular incident. We had an opening party for the property and there were so much of leftover sweets. So I asked the staff to distribute it among the workers in the property, mainly the maids. But he denied it and said “There are no sweets left”. He did this in front of the maids who were looking at the bucket full of rasgullas. The reason why he behaved in this way was that he didn’t think that maids who do the menial job of cleaning deserved to have sweets. This perspective of his angered me. That’s when I took the charge. I ordered him to distribute the sweets to anyone who comes to our door.

However, I passed through it with my parents’ support.

But even that was snatched from me when my mother started feeling insecure seeing me sitting on the manager’s chair. I once told her that after putting so much effort into this, I am not going to leave the chair. And my mother was disturbed by it because she thought that my obsession with the business will be an obstacle in my &t=1120s">marriage. “You will have to leave when you get married”, she retorted. But then I replied that I won’t leave my paternal town after marriage and take care of the business. What’s wrong in that? Don’t married women contribute to their fathers’ business?

When this logic didn’t work, she brought my brother into the conversation. She said, “If you handle the business, then what will your brother do?” “His own job” I replied instantly.

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In the end, when nothing worked to move me from the chair, my mother distracted me towards PhD and took the control of the business in her hand. I am not saying that it was wrong for my mother to handle the business. But it was wrong when she did it show me that I was not experienced and do not deserve to be on the seat. It was wrong when she did it so that the business can easily be handed over to my brother.

Didn't I deserve a chance if I was inexperienced? Was it not my responsibility to understand and grow the family business? If parents themselves take away a daughter's right on the family business, how will gender equality flourish in families? Even though the law of inheritance has made daughters equal heirs of business, how will this come into practice if parents continue to gaslight their daughters?

Today, I am not handling anything of the business. I have diverted myself to my career of writing. But I am sure that later the property where I invested and put its foundation bricks in the online world will be simply handed over to my brother. I am not against my brother handling the business. He has rights on it as much as I do. But his presence in the business will be at the cost of sabotaging my efforts to grow the business. His appointment will always remind me that I didn’t deserve the seat because of my gender.

Views expressed are the author's own. 

law of inheritance
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