Sandhya Nair

I am currently a first year student at Ashoka University. This might seem ordinary to you, but you know why it is absolutely exceptional? Because I spent the first 17 years of my life in Kamathipura, Mumbai’s largest red-light area, where my mother was a sex worker. In addition to being an unwanted, dark-skinned daughter of a sex worker, I am also a survivor of sexual abuse. In order to leave behind the stigma and discrimination against my community, I moved at 17 to Kranti, an NGO that empowers girls from Mumbai’s red-light areas to become agents of social change. Here, I learned that I’m not a victim – I’m an agent of social change. I learned to respect my mother and to love my community; I learned to heal myself and even to forgive my abusers. I had the chance to explore, travel, heal, and grow. I spent there months performing theater in the UK, six months learning English in San Francisco and completed one year of university in New York. Now, I’m studying psychology at Ashoka because someday I want to work with marginalized girls just like myself, to show them that no matter what society says about them, they also have the right to dream and the ability to soar!