Book: The Moment of Lift
Author: Melinda Gates
Publisher: Bluebird
Pages: 288; Price: Rs 599
I was discussing contraceptives with a group of women, and one young mother named Marianne said, “Do you want to know why I use contraceptives?” She then held up her baby and said, “Because I want to bring every good thing to this child before I have another.”
And just as when you come across these gems of feelings, you will know what Melinda Gates has
well put in words: her heart and a bitter-that-can-turn sweet truth. She begins with life-changing incidents from her life to reach out straight to the point and the readers.
In her book, The Moment Of Lift — How Empowering Women Changes The World, there are little but prominent one-liners that we all may have missed seeing while growing up. Say, ‘Women don’t make decisions in a vacuum’; ‘Male allies are essential’ — such deeply-involving universal truths are dropped in a pool/ocean of facts (read not opinions) and figures with finesse.
The topic she deals with — women empowerment — may be redundant and done to death. But this book is a refreshing take on the topic in a simple and light fashion (simple in meaning and light on words). And that is possible only because Gates talks less about the problems and more about active solutions.
Like the movie Inception, the book fiddles with the mind through constructive ideas emerging from solutions; every answer has another deep-rooted answer to women’s woes. The book has been written in a
flow. It is a lullaby that will sing to you, patting you to wake up to existing problems across the world, particularly India and Africa.
She speaks volumes of data, quoting studies and researches, to back the statements and the problems she has begun to solve. There are thought-provoking factors, generating out of heart-warming stories, which will also help open its readers to entangled concepts such as religion, family planning, stereotypes, gender pay gaps, and more.
In short, without directly going through the stress of third-world-country traumas, you will experience things happening at Gates’s ground zero. We may be particularly the ones who can afford to buy a book like this. Because it’s an outright need for us to read and act upon at least one tragedy of many that befall women in our country, every day.
This is a tender, careful gift note of reality to me and you; not for breaking taboos, but initiating to dilute them. The book will only make your book collection wealthier and make you richer in wisdom. After all, “Wisdom isn’t about accumulating more facts, it’s about understanding big truths in a deeper way,” writes Melinda Gates.
