Sheetal & Tara-Shweta from Kranti NGO

Sheetal & Tara are both beneficiaries turned team members at Kranti NGO, which empowers
daughters of sex-workers to become agents of social change from Mumbai’s red-light areas.

Sheetal came to Kranti at 17, only having studied in 4th & 7th standards. At 19, she finally
abandoned formal education to pursue her passion, drumming. After being rejected by all
music schools in India, Sheetal became famous for winning a scholarship to study drumming
in Washington. Since then, she's trained as a drum circle facilitator & arts based therapist,
empowering 10K+ children from 100+ marginalized communities. Sheetal spends her spare
time with the true love of her life, her rescued puppy Deejay.

Tara-Shweta (Kranti beneficiary turned team member) came to Kranti at 16. By
17, she’d been named a “25-Under-25Young Women to Watch” by Newsweek & at 18, she
earned a scholarship to Bard College in New York, becoming the first girl from an Indian
red-light area to study abroad. At 19, she received the UN’s Youth Courage Award & at 20,
she won a full scholarship to Semester at Sea and had the opportunity to visit 20 countries.
These things may have put her community on the map and brought her a lot of attention but
it took a toll on her mental health, experiencing shame and guilt that were living deep within.
Therefore, she pursued Buddhist studies to make sense of herself and bring healing to here
experiences. She spent four years studying Buddhist Philosophy in Italy before deciding to
join the Kranti team full time.

Sheetal and Tara will be at ŪRU to share their experience of growing up in the red light districts one of the most marginalized communities in India. At ŪRU they will open a world of healing and transformation through various theater and art based workshops with a focus on the feeling of existing in a marginalised community, a feeling queer folks are all too familiar with.

Workshop Details:

Intention: openness, awareness, compassion, transformation and wellbeing. (2HRS)

Part 1: Trafficking activity (40-50 mins)

The trafficking activity is an experiential session where the participants walk through different
situations that a trafficked young girl is put into and different life choices she has to make
along the way. This activity helps get a glimpse into a trafficked girl’s life and the choice she
has to make, also helps one get an experiential understanding of what it takes to navigate
real life situations that arise for a trafficked person.

Sheetal & Tara will share about their experience of growing up in the red-light districts of
Mumbai and their community

This activity has travelled across the world including to the US, UK and multiple countries in
Europe. It has helped those who know very little about the lives in the red-lights districts of
India to get an insight into situations and life choices the members of this community face.
Often there is a lot of stigma and shame around sex-work but it is mostly due to ignorance,
this experiential activity helps break the limiting mind-sets and develop deep sense of
empathy and compassion as well as respect for individuals who have to make such
decisions day in and day out.

Part 2: Integration (40-50 mins)

While going through the trafficking activity many often experience difficult emotions such as
helplessness, powerlessness and fear. We will take such emotions that have arisen during
the trafficking activity and relate to areas where we have felt similar emotions in different
circumstances in our own lives. We use art materials to bring them out of our minds and onto
the papers - we acknowledge these situations and emotions that we have felt at those times.
We see them as they are and we move towards healing them. We will use meditative &
expressive movements to release the pain and suffering that has come up and bring love
and compassion to ourselves, to heal that part of ourselves that needs healing.

Point of the above activity is that the life circumstances may be different, intensity of the
experience may vary but on the level of being human, we experience similar emotions. As
we develop deep understanding of others in our society and generate compassion, similarly
we can acknowledge painful parts of our own lives and develop compassion towards oneself
and vice versa.