Imagine losing all your inhibitions and self-consciousness through a game. It’s simple. Stand in a circle and turn-by-turn everyone will make a funny sound and all will end in laughter. And that feeling of being shy will fade away. This is how 75 lesser privileged women learnt to raise their voice against the circumstances that they were born into, and used their voice to sing. Superact, a UK-based non-profit organisation, joined hands with Mumbai’s Don Bosco Tech (DB Tech) and the Bandstand Cultural Society in India to do this. Their collaboration, New Employment Skills for India (NESI) equips women with skills in the arts, especially music with opportunities they otherwise may have never dreamt of.

Standing in a circle and making sounds is one of the games played to enhance their self-confidence during the NESI-Superact sessions

Breaking barriers
The idea germinated in 2012, when Alison Smith, Superact’s CEO visited The Musicians Federation of India, a platform that supported such kind of training then. Since October last year, 75 women between 18 and 60 years were chosen from a pool of 800 at DB Tech to let their voices soar. DB Tech is known to conduct classes in cooking, paper conversion, and candle making. Yet, finding expression through music, for these women, was a first.