The Saviour in Feminist Clothing

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vVHK97hJkA

There is a reel going viral. Eleven million views in under twenty-four hours, if the LinkedIn post announcing it is to be believed. The creator — earnest, articulate, and clearly skilled with AI tools — has made a thirty-second video in which she steps into iconic Bollywood scenes and pulls women away from their men. The mission, as she calls it: saving women from toxic men.

I watched it. I read her explanation. And I found myself with that particular feeling you get when something is clever enough to be convincing but not quite honest enough to be true.

Let me tell you what bothered me. Not in the way of outrage — I am not outraged. More like a quiet, persistent itch that refuses to be scratched away by eleven million approving thumbs.

The first problem: the films she is rescuing women from are not quite what she says they are.

The most iconic scene in the reel features DDLJ. Raj. Simran. The train. The outstretched hand. The moment when India collectively held its breath.

But here is what actually happens in that scene, if you remember it without the revision that nostalgia sometimes performs on memory. Simran's father — Bauji — turns to her and says: Ja Simran, ja. Jee le apni zindagi. He releases her. She runs. She reaches for Raj herself.

She is not dragged. She is not trapped. She chooses.

Now, one can absolutely have a conversation about whether the film's broader structure — where a father's permission is the pivot of a woman's freedom — is itself worth examining. That is a legitimate and interesting conversation. But that is a conversation about patriarchal family structure, not about Raj being a toxic man. Conflating the two is not analysis. It is a convenient simplification dressed as insight.

If your feminist reel interrupts a moment of female agency and replaces it with a rescue, you have not liberated anyone. You have just changed the rescuer's gender.

The second problem: the premise is built on a misreading, and the misreading is the product.

The creator is thoughtful enough to admit, in her own words, that she changed the narrative. She did not claim the films were secretly feminist all along. She said she reimagined them. That is an honest creative choice.

But the LinkedIn post then frames the eleven million views as evidence of deep emotional truth — as proof that women always knew, somewhere inside, that these relationships were wrong and that someone should have intervened. That is a very different claim. It moves from I made a fun AI edit to I tapped into a collective wound.

She makes two claims simultaneously. Claim one: I changed the narrative — an honest admission that the films did not originally carry an anti-toxic message. Claim two: eleven million women connected with this deeply — implying the reel struck something true and long-suppressed.

But these two claims cannot both be right. If she changed the narrative, the emotional resonance cannot be proof of pre-existing truth. You cannot rewrite a story and then cite the applause as evidence that the original story was always secretly yours.

And if Simran was free to run, if the nostalgia is for something more complicated than victimhood, then the reel did not tap into suppressed truth. It tapped into the far more available thing: flattery. It told women they were always smarter than the culture around them — that they saw through it even as they loved it. That is a beautiful thing to be told. It is also precisely what lets everyone off the hook. Real cultural critique leaves a small bruise. It asks you to reckon with what you accepted, not just celebrate that someone has finally arrived to save you from it.

The third problem — and this is the one that stayed with me longest — is that the rescuer in a feminist video is still a rescuer.

The visual grammar of the reel is unchanged from the structure it claims to critique. A powerful figure enters the story. The woman in peril is passive. She is moved from one situation to another by someone else's intervention. The camera follows the person doing the saving, not the person being saved.

The reel's message, if you strip away the AI filmmaking and the nostalgia and the cinematic editing, is this: women were too conditioned to recognise the problem themselves. So someone had to come in and fix it for them.

That is not empowerment. That is the oldest story in the world, with a woman in the hero role.

Genuine feminist storytelling — the kind that actually costs something to make and something to watch — would show the woman herself seeing the pattern. Choosing differently. Walking away on her own terms. The power in that story comes from within. It does not arrive on a rescue mission.

There is a particular irony in the fact that Simran's moment of agency — running towards a choice she made — is the scene being "corrected." In the name of feminism, she has been made passive again.

I want to be fair. The creator clearly has talent. The technical execution is impressive. And the underlying cultural point — that Bollywood has a long history of romanticising control, possession, and boundary-crossing as love — is worth making. Kabir Singh exists. Darr exists. There is genuine material to work with.

But eleven million views built on a shaky premise are not the same as eleven million people having a genuine awakening. It might just be eleven million people enjoying the comfort of being told they were always, already, right.

The most useful question a piece of cultural commentary can ask is: what did you miss, and why? The reel never asks it. It only answers: you missed nothing. You always knew. Someone just had to come and get you out.

That is a very satisfying thing to be told. It is also, quietly, the problem.

 

Rest Days Are Part of Training

Leadership during ERP implementation | Learning cycles, retrospectives, psychological safety

There is a particular kind of discipline the gym teaches that many leaders overlook. It is not the discipline of lifting heavier, pushing harder, or adding one more set. It is the discipline of knowing when not to push. The discipline of recovery. The discipline of pausing. The discipline of rest.

Progress in training does not happen only when the weight is moving. It happens after the workout — when the body repairs, adapts, and returns stronger. Without recovery, training becomes strain. Strain becomes fatigue. Fatigue becomes injury.

ERP implementations are no different. However, many leaders manage these projects as if constant pressure is the only way to succeed. They push for more reviews, escalate issues, emphasize urgency, work late, and demand rapid progress. But intensity does not equal progress. Moving quickly does not mean successful adoption. And exhaustion doesn’t prove true commitment.

The best implementations understand something more fundamental. Rest days are part of training.

The Hidden Fatigue Inside ERP Projects

An ERP implementation asks people to do two jobs at once.

They must run today’s business while helping to build tomorrow’s operating model. They must meet customer deadlines while attending workshops, validating masters, testing transactions, learning new screens, and adapting to new controls.

On the project plan, these are tasks. Within the organisation, there are loads.

A finance executive is reconciling old habits with new approval workflows.
A production planner is concerned that data accuracy will disrupt scheduling.
A sales user is anxious about capturing every lead and follow-up in the CRM.
A warehouse supervisor fears dispatch delays after go-live.

This is why some projects look healthy in meetings but feel heavy on the ground. The dashboard may be green even as people run out of energy.

In the gym, that is the athlete smiling through overtraining. The numbers may still look fine — right up until the breakdown begins.

Go-Live Is Not the Finish Line

One of the most common leadership mistakes is treating go-live as the final rep.

The system launches. Emails are sent. Photos are taken. Leadership congratulates the team. Attention then shifts to the next priority.

But anyone who has lived through an ERP implementation knows the real work often begins after go-live.

That is when users face live pressure.
That is when process gaps become visible.
That is when confidence is tested.
That is when small frustrations can turn into resistance.

In gym terms, go-live is not racking the weight and walking away. It is the moment you ask: was the lift strong, or did we compromise form to finish it?

Retrospectives: Checking Form After the Lift

Strong leaders create pauses during implementation, not because the project is failing, but because learning requires space.

A retrospective is the organisational equivalent of checking the form after a lift. You do it not because something went wrong, but because improvement requires feedback.

After blueprint sign-off.
After UAT.
After training waves.
After the mock migration.
After the first month’s close on the new system.

The questions are simple and powerful:

• What worked well?
• Where did users struggle?
• What surprised us?
• Which assumptions were wrong?
• What must we improve before the next phase?

Without these pauses, teams repeat friction until it becomes the norm.

Psychological Safety Is Recovery for the Mind

Physical recovery repairs muscles. Psychological safety repairs trust. 

Every ERP project depends on people speaking honestly and early. Yet many stay silent.

They do not admit to confusion.
They hide adoption problems.
They understate risks.
They say “all good” when they mean “we are stuck.”

Why? Because honesty can feel unsafe. Psychological safety is not softness. It is a form of implementation intelligence. When people feel safe, they say:

• “Training was not enough.”
• “This workflow is slowing us down.”
• “Master data needs cleanup.”
• “Users need support on the shop floor.”
• “We made the wrong design choice.”

That honesty saves projects. Silence delays failure until it becomes costly. In the gym, ignored pain becomes injury. In ERP, ignored truth becomes rework.

Great Implementations Use Cycles

The best training programmes do not require maximum effort every day. They work in cycles: push, recover, adapt, repeat.

ERP leadership should do the same.

There are phases for design intensity.
Phases for testing discipline.
Phases for hypercare support.
Phases for stabilisation.
Phases for optimisation.

If every phase is treated like an emergency, people burn out and judgment declines.

Sometimes the best leadership move is not another escalation meeting. It is a day of focused user support.
Sometimes the fastest decision is not more pressure. It is less confusion.
Sometimes the smartest way to move forward is to pause and restore confidence.

What Leaders Should Do Now

§  Build recovery into the plan- Stabilisation is not optional. Schedule it.

§  Run retrospectives at every milestone - Capture lessons while they are fresh.

§  Measure energy, not just status - A green tracker can hide a tired workforce.

§  Reward early truth - Thank the person who raises a problem early.

§  Stay visible after go-live - Leadership presence matters most when confidence dips.

Final Lift

Any leader can ask for one more sprint. Mature leaders know how to sustain performance.

ERP implementation is not won by endlessly pushing people. It is won by helping people learn, adapt, recover, and grow stronger through change.

Because in the gym, and in transformation, recovery is not the opposite of progress.

It is where progress becomes tangible.

 

Anna, Bella, and the First Lesson in Loss

I may sound like a broken record when I keep bringing everything back to education, but it is hard not to, because it quietly influences how we experience almost everything else in life. Today, the trigger was a short write-up by a friend who started with a simple question: Why does “we need to talk” feel like a threat to our entire existence? Because, in some ways, it is.

We are never truly taught that there is a “need to talk”—not just with others, but, more crucially, with ourselves. We are not guided on how to sit with our feelings, how to name them, or how to make sense of them. So, when we hear the words “we need to talk,” it signifies something entirely different. It feels like escalation. Like a situation that demands “all arms.” Like something is about to break, and we are already unprepared. Not because the conversation is hard, but because we have never learned how to have it.

And perhaps that is the deeper loss we bear—the loss of the ability to converse with ourselves. The inability to pause, to grant ourselves space, to understand what is happening within us before we are asked to respond to the world outside. When that inner dialogue is absent, every external conversation begins to feel like a confrontation. And perhaps that is one of our earliest and most invisible experiences of grief—not something we recognise, but something we live with.

I am reminded of my niece at ten, who asked for two goldfish—Anna and Bella. She fed them every day, made sure the bowl was clean, and watched them with a kind of care that only children seem to possess. One morning, we woke up to find both fish dead. She was still asleep, and the adults in the house were left with a question we were not quite prepared for—how do we tell her? It did not go down well. There was shock, then silence, and then inconsolable crying. And then, something else. She insisted we bury them in a pot in the garden. Looking back, that may have been her first real encounter with grief, and instinctively, she knew what to do—she gave it a ritual, a space, a meaning.

Because grief is not just sadness. It is the moment reality refuses to match what we expected. It is the collapse of something that felt certain—a presence, a pattern, a possibility. It is not only about losing someone; it is about losing what that someone meant, what they held together, what they quietly made possible. Grief feels like powerlessness. It asks us to sit with something we cannot fix, reverse, or control. And that is precisely why we either rush to escape it—or stay trapped in it, long after the moment has passed.

Her next encounter occurred later, when her mother was admitted to hospital for surgery. She was usually fine when her mother travelled, but this time was different. Travel was temporary and predictable, but a hospital brought uncertainty. That was more difficult to accept. It makes one wonder what we truly believe grief to be. Is it solely about death, or is it also about the disruption of what feels stable and anticipated?

For much of her early years, she was in a Montessori environment where learning was conceptual, exploratory, and self-paced. She was not constantly compared to others, nor pushed into structured competition. It makes me wonder whether the question is not whether children experience pressure or failure, but whether they are helped to understand and process what those experiences mean.

We spend a lot of time debating educational systems—traditional, Montessori, Waldorf—each with its own philosophy of learning. But there is a quieter question we rarely ask: what is the child’s relationship with learning?

That relationship is where some of the earliest, most unseen forms of grief start. When a child feels they are not good at something, that it is not for them, or that they are not noticed, something shifts. Not dramatically or visibly, but something disconnects. If that moment is not recognised or named, it does not go away. It quietly settles and begins to influence how the child appears later—through disinterest, avoidance, withdrawal, or sometimes overwhelming emotional reactions.

Grief is not just about loss; it also involves the difficulty of making sense of change, accepting success without fear, and enduring failure without falling apart. Yet, we do not teach this. We instruct children on how to perform, but rarely on how to connect—their experiences, their feelings, and what it all means for them.

That, perhaps, is the missing conversation.

Because when a child can say that something is hard, that something matters, or that something does not feel like them, they are not just becoming better learners. They are learning how to stay connected to themselves.

I find myself thinking about what I want for my girls. Not a life without difficult conversations, but the ability to approach them differently. To move from hearing “we need to talk” with anxiety, to saying “let’s talk” with calm and confidence. To be part of an environment that allows them to sit with ambiguity, to work through what they feel, and to trust the voices within them—without fear of being dismissed, silenced, or burned for it, like Joan of Arc.

Because perhaps the true purpose of education is not merely to prepare children for the world, but to ensure they do not lose themselves in the process.

 

Leadership Under Load — Ego Lifts Get You Injured

Every gym has one.

The person who loads more weight than they can actually lift. A quick glance around, a slightly louder-than-necessary grunt, plates added to the bar with quiet theatre. The bar comes up halfway, the back bends, and someone rushes in to help.

In the gym I call this an ego lift — lifting to be seen, not to be strong.
In organisations, the same instinct shows up as well-intentioned leadership optimism.

In many ERP implementations — especially SAP Business One rollouts — a familiar moment appears early. A senior leader, often well-meaning and energetic, announces a timeline.

“We will go live in 90 days.”
“This will solve our reporting issues.”
“After this, decisions will be data-driven.”

The room becomes silent. Not because everyone agrees, but because nobody wants to be the person who says it cannot be done. The leader is not lifting a barbell. The leader is lifting expectations. And expectations are heavier than steel.

Ego lifts rarely come from arrogance. They come from pressure. Boards want speed. Customers want reliability. Teams want clarity. Investors want certainty. Leadership fills uncertainty with confidence.

But confidence is not capacity.

ERP implementation is not a motivational project. It is a structural one. Master data must be cleaned. Processes must be redesigned. Roles must become clear. Users must learn new behaviour. Old habits must fade slowly. Hero cultures skip this phase and go straight to the heavy weight.

What follows is predictable. Timelines shrink artificially. Training is rushed. Testing becomes symbolic. Exceptions multiply. Workarounds begin. The organisation technically goes live. Operationally, it does not.

Excel stays “just for safety.”
Approvals continue on WhatsApp.
Reports are distrusted.
Finance reconciles manually.

From the outside the lift looks successful. Inside the muscle, a tear has already begun.

This is the most dangerous ERP failure — not collapse, but partial adoption. The system exists, but behaviour does not change.

In the gym, ego lifting injures the back. In organisations, it injures trust.

After one strained implementation, employees stop believing timelines, managers stop committing to change, IT stops getting cooperation, and leadership stops receiving honest feedback. The next project becomes harder before it even begins. People do not resist technology. They resist pain they have experienced before.

I should admit this — I have done ego lifts too. Not dramatic ones. The polite corporate version. And occasionally, the literal gym version.

There are days when you feel unusually energetic. You slept well. The music is right. You want to progress faster than your body has negotiated for. So you say to the trainer, “Let’s increase the weight today.” Sometimes you don’t say it directly. You just repeat, “I think I can.”

My trainer does not argue. He just gives a look.

It is a calm, very firm no — the kind you immediately understand is not about authority. It is about consequence. A good trainer is not managing today’s lift. He is protecting tomorrow’s workout. Some days your muscles are strong but your stabilisers are tired. Some days your enthusiasm is ready but your joints are not. You do not always have the data to judge your own capacity.

Leadership works exactly like that.

Many times in ERP projects, leaders — including me — push timelines not out of ego, but optimism. We see benefits early and want momentum. We want progress to feel real. But organisations also have stabilisers: users learning new screens, finance closing cycles differently, managers trusting system reports, teams unlearning parallel processes.

When we push the organisation to lift more than its readiness, the system does not collapse immediately. It compensates. People work late. Excel returns quietly. Manual approvals restart. The project looks successful until months later adoption falls.

That is when you realise what the trainer already knew.

Capacity is not decided by motivation. It is decided by repeatability.

The strongest lifters in the gym are not the loudest. They warm up, start light, repeat movements correctly, and add weight slowly. They are not trying to impress the room. They are trying to survive repetition.

Good ERP leadership looks the same. Strong leaders say: we stabilise master data first, we pilot before scaling, finance closes one full cycle in the system before go-live, adoption matters more than date. It sounds cautious. It is actually courageous. The hardest leadership act is not making a promise. It is setting a boundary.

Hero culture says a strong leader solves problems personally. System culture says a strong leader builds a system where problems reduce over time.

ERP implementations succeed when leadership stops trying to be the strongest individual in the room and becomes the protector of process discipline. The goal is not a dramatic go-live. The goal is a boring month-end close.

If your ERP implementation feels exciting on launch day, be careful. In the gym, excitement during the lift usually means the weight is wrong. Organisations rarely fail on the day of the ego lift. They fail slowly — through workaround, fatigue, and quiet disengagement.

Strong leadership does not lift the heaviest weight.

It lifts the weight the organisation can repeat tomorrow. 

And sometimes the most responsible leadership decision is simply this: Not yet. We build strength first.