The Inspiring Life Stories of the Fat. So? Podcasters
The Fat. So? podcast starts with a cheery dare, as if inviting bullies and the Body-size Police, to arrest or punish the feisty voices that declare: “I’m fat and I love getting compliments about the way I look. So?” “I’m fat and I love eating a hot chocolate fudge at Nirula’s. So?” After listening to the first few episodes, I was hooked. Hosted by the very intelligent and exuberant duo, Ameya and Pallavi, the show takes on a significant site of stigma – body size – exploding myths and pernicious stereotypes, while also inviting listeners to share in a jaunty self-acceptance. After all, like skin colour, body size is as much a socially-constructed form of discrimination, with certain body sizes posited as “normal,” and those below or above a mythical standard subjected to micro-aggressions.
While fat activism has gained voices in many parts of the globe, Pallavi and Ameya realized that the Indian population lacked visible spokespersons. Recognizing a need to promote body positivity in an increasingly oppressive visual culture, they banded together to share their experiences and raise critical questions.
Charting Pallavi’s Journey To Fat. So?
By the time she attended college, Pallavi had already lived in three different countries. Her early childhood was spent in Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, where her family lived in a plush house that overlooked sun-licked lagoons. Since her parents were going through a fraught time there, Pallavi recalls being a target of their spillover anger. As a chubby child, she was already being fat-shamed at school, though she wouldn’t have had the awareness to call out her peers’ behavior for what it was: “I remember being called a potato at school,” she says. From Abidjan, the family moved to Lagos in Nigeria, where Pallavi was to top her class right through her school years, often by a wide margin. It was in Lagos, too, that she fell in love with books, cultivating an academic outlook that was to bolster her in later years.
The family moved to Delhi when she was 14. The Indian capital was a cultural jolt in many ways. Besides acclimatizing herself to a new school and unfamiliar peer group, she needed to contend with eve-teasing on bus rides. While she had lost a lot of weight in Lagos, she gained it back in Delhi without realizing it.
Accustomed to being popular at Lagos, she also had to deal with the jibes directed at her intelligence. Because even at Delhi, she was a class topper: “When someone made fun of my getting such high marks, I said I want friends more than marks.” Seeking social acceptance rather than an envied competitive edge, Pallavi recalls trying to slip into the second or third position in class. A similar tossup between her yearning for friends and her personal ambitions led her to the Lady Shri Ram College for Women, fortified by a sense that a women’s only environment might be more accepting than a co-ed institution. Such decisions were also partially influenced by her body size: “Compromise was the only way I could make up for being fat.”
In large part, her college experience was a positive one. She met her first boyfriend and gained many women friends. She recalls a time in the second year, when a friend persuaded her to get a new haircut. At the salon, when a transformed Pallavi glimpsed at her reflection, she was surprised by how lovely she looked. “I can be a model,” she said and the onlookers readily agreed.
After LSR, she decided to attempt the CAT and enter a premium MBA program. Studying for a mere three weeks, she cracked the intensely competitive exam and was admitted to IIM Indore. When the program ended, despite being armed with a pedigreed degree, she was certain about wanting to work in Human Resources rather than in the more sought after functions like Marketing or Finance. Eventually, she worked for about fourteen years in corporate jobs, including a 11-year stint at Nokia.
The year 2014 was a pivotal one, both personally and professionally. While she had learned Reiki at an early age and also used her intuitive skills to guide people across the globe, helping them circumvent personal blocks, she also suffered, like many talented women, from imposter syndrome. She started feeling that she did not deserve her success because she couldn’t lose weight.
When it came to getting on weight loss programs, every failure or reversal hurt. She was exhausted with trying one dietary fad after another. “I felt like either I have to stop living or live in a way that I am at peace with who I am.” She had always been a creative person, able to forge a distinctive solution when confronted with a thorny situation. That was a skill she was born with, an “ability to look at a third way, in a manner that nobody else has thought of.”
That year, she had started dressing with more confidence, trying on more daring styles. While googling, like many women are wont to do, “Is it okay to wear a black bra under a white top?” she realized that she had never googled a question that had been buried inside her: “Do men like fat women?” In a flash, when she googled a topic that was residing in her psyche but never explicitly explored, she stumbled on an avalanche of material about body positivity. It was almost like massive boulders had shifted, revealing sunlit pastures that had been there all along, but hidden from her sight.
She discovered Tess Holliday, an American plus-size model and blogger, a woman who had a body similar to hers but was clearly savoring her life, across many dimensions. Holliday was not only a model, but also the host of a podcast and the parent of two children. Excited by her find, a piqued Pallavi kept searching for more role models. Virgie Tovar, for instance, who was an author, activist and speaker. Then there was Ragen Chastain, a speaker, writer, marathoner, dancer and coach among other things. Pallavi, always an avid reader, soaked up all their articles and blogs. She started following them on Instagram, even as she searched for plus-sized modeling opportunities in India.
When the team at Plus Size Models India visited her home to take pictures, they were enamored. They said: “You’re gorgeous.” She got different clothes tailored and some of her photographs were featured in a Times of India article. But she was still beset by nagging doubts about her health.
Around then, she participated in ‘The Walk of Hope’ – a walk organized to foster interfaith harmony across the country. The full walk comprised of 7,500 kilometers and Pallavi completed 2,500 kilometers. At first, she felt more tired than other walkers, but towards the end, she realized that her aches and pains were no worse. She started sensing that she could do much more with her body, if she focused on building her strength. She also read the book, Health At Every Size by Lindo Bacon, which convinced her that fitness could be achieved without weight loss. When she bounced this off her family doctor, he readily agreed.
This was also a period when her marriage was disintegrating. Though she and her husband still felt love for each other, she sensed that her partner’s fatphobic stance and functional alcoholism was doing too much harm. So, by 2016, she quit her corporate job (her newfound confidence made her realize she wanted to contribute in many more ways!) and separated from her husband. She made a pact with herself to stop embarking on new diets and to find her own route to eating.
Even as she joined a family-run enterprise to sustain herself financially, she started participating in body positive forums and promotions on Facebook. The New Zealand-based Cat Pause, a fat activist and Fat Studies scholar at Massey University spotted her hashtag #allbodiesaregoodbodies and connected to interview her. That was the first time that Pallavi had spoken to another fat woman about the subjective experience of being fat. And more so, about fat liberation: “It was just mind-blowing, that conversation.” Galvanized by the quality of the discussion, she realized that she needed to engage in more such conversations. To change the nature of the discourse, both for herself and for others.
By 2019, she had quit her job. She realized, after some deep introspection, that she wanted to let the world know that it was possible to live freely in a fat body as a woman. She also decided to certify as a Coach to help other folks transform themselves across various dimensions.
During this period, she attended a gathering for single women in their ‘40s. Run by a friend who fostered a community called Gather Sisters (https://gathersisters.com/), she was invited to moderate a gathering of plus size women. In that session, Pallavi recalls a moving moment when the whole room paused and realized: “Shit, we get each other.” Attendees shared anecdotes about times when they might have risen from an office chair, only to have the chair rise up with them: “You want to laugh but are also embarrassed at the same time.” That kind of collective understanding was electrifying.
When she returned home, Pallavi was filled with so much elation, she continued to journal her thoughts on a pad. She conceived of many more topics that ought to be discussed. At that event, Pallavi had also met with Ameya for the first time. Sensing an immediate connection, they met up soon after and decided to jointly host the Fat. So? Podcast. The show has helped Pallavi clarify her own thoughts about fat liberation and highlighted some of the contradictions in her own life. As someone who likes to “walk the talk,” she has tried to incorporate necessary changes as her own learning and thinking evolves.
Ameya’s Life Story Leading up to Fat. So?
Ameya’s childhood memories start with her early school years in Hyderabad. What she remembers starkly about that period is feeling like a sort-of misfit in the public school that she attended. Recognizing that her family’s bookish culture was different from that of most other kids in the school, she needed to consciously make an effort to “belong” to the cultural and linguistic universe of her peers. For instance, she deliberately watched Bollywood movies of the ‘90s, so she could chime in with relevant opinions or catchphrases.
Moreover, her professional parents traveled extensively on work. Ameya recalls being a tempestuous child, throwing tantrums whenever her parents needed to journey to some other city. She even penned a caustic letter to her mother, articulating why she could never grow up to be a lawyer since her mother had neglected her during work-related trips. Strong self-expression and a flair for writing was wired into her family’s makeup. While their household conversations were often vigorous and compelling, she was to realize later that such unbridled expression wasn’t ubiquitous. Sensing that she was somehow different – perhaps more articulate, more reflective – she sometimes felt like a “freak” in relation to a seemingly boxed-in mainstream.
She also started becoming fat when she was about eight years old. This only heightened her feeling of exclusion. Fortunately for her generation and in her school, teenage lust wasn’t encouraged. After the 10th Grade however, she moved to another school, where there were few women in a class that comprised of about 35 boys. In that co-ed setting, she was to face an emotional whiplash that would scar her long-term schooling memories: “That is where I got smacked in the face with the expectation of how we’re supposed to look and how I’m supposed to be.” In that school, she was smarter than all her peers. But she did not bother with pushing herself to perform at the highest level, because she thought that she would be penalized for excelling. Besides she was already being punished for not subscribing to patriarchal norms for how women were supposed to be: “Decorative and good for your ego.”
Like most other young women of that age, she had a crush on some guy, who may or may not have liked her in return. All that was par for the course. Then the boys started something called the “Ameya Hating Association” and they had even devised an acronym for it – AHA. When she discovered its expansion one day, she felt like she was breaking up inside. She carried the trauma of her high-school harassment inside her for years, prodding her to build walls or barricades in new relationships. Even today, she has to willfully make herself vulnerable to other people, an emotional risk that she’s gradually learning to take.
Fortunately for Ameya, her college years at St. Stephen’s in Delhi were much more pleasurable. For the first time in her life, she met a multicultural and multifaceted crowd that she could relate to: “That’s the first time in my life I belonged.” She also enjoyed participating in theatre, where she met with a gang that was younger than she was, but also receptive and broadminded.
She returned to Hyderabad for a Master’s in CIEFL – now called the English and Foreign Languages University. At that institute, she learned Spanish and cultivated what was to become an abiding passion for Latin America and Latin American literature. Those interests have continued shape the rest of her life: “Spanish has been such a big and beautiful part of my life for so many years.”
Soon after, she started working for Foundation Books, an imprint of Cambridge University Press. Since the books were often dry and tedious, the job did not grip her. Around then, she visited the U.S. for a cousin’s wedding, and she felt like she would like to live abroad for a while. Leveraging her expertise in Spanish and interest in Latin American studies, she applied to NYU for a Master’s.
While she had been at a low point just before entering that program, her New York stint was transformative. For a change, there was the exhilaration of being who she was, without being on her guard at all times: “It was a shockingly liberating feeling.” She also realized, like Pallavi had at various inflection points, that she was an attractive woman who could flaunt her body – without changing it – in stylish clothes. Moreover, at NYU she was tugged in by all the material on post-colonialism, economic development, cultural criticism and by encounters with diverse fellow-learners.
She felt like her soul belonged New York city. It seemed like the one place in the world, where she could express every dimension of her being – her Indianness, her zest for Salsa and all things Latin American, her fluency in Spanish, her love for reading and books, her agility with words and ideas. Unfortunately, for Ameya, since she graduated in 2008, jobs in the U.S. were tricky after the economic crash. So she returned to Hyderabad to work. At first, she worked with a Chennai-based company and then with Deloitte, where she met with a large gang that she could hang out with on weekends. Later, however, she moved back to Delhi and joined Penguin India. Despite accepting a massive pay cut, she enjoyed her commissioning role at Penguin.
Since she also needed to hike her earnings, she decided to embark on a midlife MBA at Madrid. While she loved spending a year in the Spanish city, she eventually returned to media and editorial roles in Delhi. She’s currently an Associate Editor at Global Voices which reports on marginalized experiences and voices.
In the meanwhile, she had also attended a journaling workshop being conducted by Gather Sisters. In the plus size session, she bumped into Pallavi and sensed a distinct chemistry: it was a meeting that led to the genesis of the Fat. So? Podcast.
From The Podcast
The team hopes their podcast will help people stand up to the world and accept themselves, as they are, rather than trying to morph themselves to please imagined or constructed ‘others’. It’s immensely gratifying to them when kids or young adults from small towns in India call or write in to them, with accounts of how empowered they feel after listening to their episodes.
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