A powerful,moving book talks about leadership lessons from the unlikeliest people

My first visit to a brothel is indelibly etched, not just in my memory, but deep inside my soul as well. I worked for one of the world’s finest non-profits, CARE, and we were managing an HIV/AIDS project in Agra area. Our Project Manager, a young professional by the name of Vinod Kumar, took me to a brothel to help me gain firsthand knowledge of the challenges of condom distribution and use. We climbed the stairs of a dank, dark, dilapidated building to emerge onto a brighter first floor where women sat in small balcony nooks to solicit customers on the streets below. The sex-worker who was the point-person for storage and distribution of and creating awareness about condoms in that brothel, officially called a Peer Educator, told us she had a headache and had to solicit customers, so had no time for us. Then she turned to one of the women in the balconies. “Ay, Sajjo, help these Sirs understand how we work with condoms” she told the woman in Hindi and disappeared. That was when we turned and saw Sajjo. The first thing we noticed was how strikingly beautiful she was. Youthful and glowing! Then Sajjo stood up and we again noticed that she was, at least, 6 months pregnant! Finally, Sajjo started walking towards us from the balcony where she was soliciting and we noticed that she was suffering from polio! That evening in 2004, in the red light area of Agra, I was handed a #lesson in #courage and #humanity that I will remember forever. Sajjo spoke with us in an even, firm voice and in the style of a raconteur took in a broad sweep – her life, husband, the type of customers she faced, usage of condoms, her children and why she was in the world’s oldest profession. Not once did any bitterness creep into her voice. There was not one word of self-pity or anger. She was the personification of Mother Courage and that is the image of Sajjo that will stay with me. It was a life changing moment, in the sense that from that moment onward I had new respect, even admiration, for sex-workers. The word ‘prostitute’, shamefully a term of abuse, disappeared from my lexicon. I was to meet with and work with sex-workers again in Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh while I was working that terrific, values-driven company, Dr.Reddy’s and architecting a #CSR engagement there. The project did not take off but I have fond memories of meeting with groups of sex-workers and holding conversations with them regarding their needs and aspirations. Another former #CARE colleague, the intrepid Junita Nirmal, was my guiding light in helping set up those meetings.

It was, therefore, thrilling to come across the book, “A Stranger Truth” by Ashok Alexander which is subtitled ‘Lessons in Love, Leadership and Courage from India’s Sex Workers’. There have been others who have done outstanding work with sex workers, making them aware of their #rights, providing them with #health and #security and, most importantly, dignity. Ashok, however, reaches into their life, uncovers their circumstances and emerges with the heroic love and courage that streams through their life. We owe a debt of gratitude to him for documenting it it all in this riveting book. No page in this book makes for pleasant reading. You cannot be but moved by the tale of the teenage sex-worker Kamala with two toddling children, abandoned by her husband, being inveigled into a gang-rape, but worrying through it all about the fate of her children who she had parked in the bushes nearby. Or, the transgender Malvika, torn between gender identities, thrown out of an already indigent home and fending for herself in the sex-work community. She comes back home to make peace with her father who had thrown her literally to the wolves, and then move on. Or, Shahid, desperately poor, married, in love with his wife and children and terrified of the truth about his sex-work with men being known. The world of sex-work is a black hole that claims every soul for its insurmountable gravity of greedy pimps, lethal madams, seedy locations and barbaric conditions. And, yet, Ashok has, winning against that gravity, brought out the heroism in a world no one, but no one enters by choice.

For over a decade, Ashok, once a McKinsey consultant, led the Gates Foundation's Avahan program that worked to control HIV/AIDS in India. 'A Stranger Truth' is the kind of tour de force that emerges from a diary that must have copious jottings. In his work that so closely touches real but hidden and neglected people Ashok came up close with the reality of sex-work and drug abuse that most of us pretend doesn't concern us. The book details that hidden underbelly and challenges us to look away. For there are golden nuggets of #wisdom and #leadership that can only serve us very well.

It is also a book that will cause you deep discomfort and, if you are sensitive, much pain. You will often cry, as Ashok did. As I did. Yet for all of us blessed enough to work in regular jobs and organizations, it is required reading. For many who would like to know what NGO work is all about, there is plenty of material. You will discover what it takes to wage a long, lonely battle with society and systems to work for the welfare of others in Ashok's recounting of the establishment of the Ashodaya organization in Mysore that works to protect sex-workers in the city. A shout-out,too, to Chiki Sarkar and her Juggernaut books for publishing this.Long years back I discovered a well-spring of courage, love and sheer grit in a brothel in Agra. It has never dried up. You will, too, in this book. It deserves to be widely read.