ET Awards: Make this the century of crazy Indian woman, says Times Group VC & MD Samir Jain

Times Group VC and MD Samir Jain’s welcome address at the ET Awards for Corporate Excellence 2022 had one singular, powerful — and radical — message: To make this century not just India’s, but that of the ‘Crazy Indian Woman’.

In a video message, he prefaced his appeal to FM Nirmala Sitharaman with a Nike ad clip that showcased moments in which women in international sports have gone against their traditional ‘calm and composed’ roles, and have been passionate, angry, emotional, ruthless — ‘crazy’, by the usual behavioural standards imposed and propagated in an alpha male-dominated arena.

These ‘crazy’ women have reached not only the pinnacle of their careers, but also scaled the heights of the hyper-competitive and gender-skewed world of professional sports by going against the grain. The economic arena should treat this as an inspiration, he said.


Tapping this “indomitable spirit of the woman, the ‘crazy’ woman — bold, fearless, and unstoppable” who “redefines rules, reshapes narratives, and reinvigorates all”, Jain made an impassioned pitch for gender-budgeting as a means to not only empower women in the boardroom and the workplace, but to unleash the full potential of Indian economy’s prowess through this gendered action perspective.

He listed the policy changes in FM’s February budget, describing them cumulatively as “one grand step in the continuous journey to make Bharat Aatmanirbhar”. He suggested that “the ‘crazy’ potential in the Indian woman… the force of Ashta Lakshmi in her avant-garde form from boardrooms, to courts, to Cabinets, breaking maninterruptions and mansplainings” be also now unleashed.

Jain recalled how more than a decade ago, Sitharaman had prepared an entire docket on gender-budgeting to then-FM P Chidambaram. “We would love to learn from you more of how gender-budgeting can unleash the ‘crazy’ potential for our own women’s and men’s empowerment.”

What seems ‘crazy’ today will stop being ‘crazy’ when it is ‘just done’. “Because,” as he underlined, “the ones who are ‘crazy’ enough to think that they can change India, are the ones who do.”