Udaipur, 10th September 2019: IIM Udaipur conducted an interactive session of student community with Miss World Diversity, Naaz Joshi.  She is a transgender woman, an activist, a single mother, who has won the beauty pageant title, Miss World Diversity, for the third time consecutively in the year 2017, 2018 and 2019.  With an aim to create awareness about inclusiveness of the third gender into society among future business leaders of IIM Udaipur, Naaz Joshi shared her experience and struggles.  Remarkable to note is that mutual respect and inclusion are considered as core values of IIM Udaipur which are consistent with objectives of this interaction.  The interactive session was organized by student community, was attended by 75 guests that included Director, faculties, and students.

While discussing about her struggles being a transgender woman, she briefed about her journey where she was abandoned by her parents at age of 7, raped at 11, post which she did PGDBA in marketing from IMT Ghaziabad.  She also went on to learn fashion from institute like NIFT and how in her professional career, she was mistreated multiple times.  She urged future leaders of IIM Udaipur to consider inclusion of LGBTQI community basis their talent and nothing else.

She talked about how scrapping of Section 377 has bring change in metro cities like Delhi but still has not shown significant change in states like Rajasthan. She also mentioned examples that how post scrapping section 377, media is helping the community to raise their voice.

She went on to say that, “One can find enough evidence of that from Ramayan, Mahabharat and some age old scriptures. Britishers came and brought section 377 but it took 70 long years for us to scrap Section 377.”  She also said that, “it is very crucial for transgender to succeed because only then people will accept and respect them.”