Women’s Locker Room

About 3600 people in India turn to Google every month for ‘Collarbone Exercises’. This number doesn’t include the numerous variations of the query with the same intent – ‘exercise for collar bone,’ ‘collar bone workout,’ and finally, ‘how to get collar bone’. I want to take a moment here to remind anyone who’s reading this – you have a collarbone. Every one has a collarbone. Some have visible clavicles. Others don’t.

The idea of an all-women group that meets on weekends to play sports and do fitness might seem ordinary but Sisters in Sweat have created a paradigm shift. Though fitness for women is feminist in itself (more on that soon), the infusion of the community aspect makes this nothing short of revolutionary. And for the founders of Sisters in Sweat – Swetha Subbiah and Tanvie Hans – this revolutionary potential of one football game was serendipitous.

The global average life expectancy today is 72.6 years. But oddly, women everywhere live longer than men. The average life expectancy of men, globally, is around 70 years whereas for women it is about 75 years. This isn’t just seen in humans. In many species like chimpanzees, gorillas, and other apes, females outlive their male counterparts.

Google was able to throw around 29,60,000 results in just 0.58 seconds when I searched for ‘managing teenage mood swings.’ And it took me precisely that amount of time to skim through the top 10 results to know that most parents, like me, are clueless and searching for answers in the ethers. Sometimes search doesn’t help but experience does.