I wasn’t thinking about kitty parties until my mother asked me to pick her up from one. My maasi’s building has a crochet circle, and my mother, whose handmade batuas have acquired a local fan following, was their chief guest. Since she was taking “five more minutes” for the better part of twenty, I wandered over to Wikipedia to read about how kitty parties got their name.
I found out that the women upstairs, deep in another round of ‘matka atka latka jhatka’, were partaking in a tradition born from the earliest female-run microfinance savings circles to emerge post Partition. On the drive back home, I told my mother that the most enduring female response to the largest upheaval on the subcontinent was a gathering. “Do you think a man could have ever responded to the Partition with anything that has the word ‘party’ in it?” she responded smugly. It reminded me of Susan Pinker’s viral TED Talk titled ‘The Secret To Living Longer May Be Your Social Life’. In 2017—long before tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson tried to reverse his biological age—the Canadian psychologist and author posited that women outlive men because we prioritise and maintain in-person friendships, creating a biological defence system against physical atrophy.
It would have been a fracturing discovery a few years ago, when I was in my early 20s. I came of age believing that a good life was something you built yourself. Everyone I knew was doing one of these things back then: reading Ikigai, taking cues from The Tim Ferriss Show, disappearing to a Vipassana retreat, running a half-marathon. The assumption was simple. If something was missing from your life, the answer was to ‘work on yourself ’.
To be fair, the women of my generation did inherit a great deal of freedom, the kind our grandmothers couldn’t have imagined. But I realised the limit of that promise when I was crying on my birthday, far from home. I could live in the city of my dreams, pay my rent, wear the Mac Mehr lipstick I had purchased with my own salary, but I had no one to cut my cake with. Watching my mother laugh while making woollen octopuses with her peers in 2026 makes me feel like the pendulum is swinging back.
Pooja Das Sarkar started Champaca Collective, a WhatsApp group for women over 40 that discusses everything from hormones to solo travel, to make sense of a phase of life she felt unprepared for. “At 40, we have experienced life and its pitfalls and are in the process of remaking and rethinking our lives,” she says. “This transitional stage requires collective strength and support.”
Give women a crisis, and we will come out of it with solutions powered by congregation. As I type this, women all over India are coalescing into walking groups to protest the sexual assault of a minor inside Delhi’s Aastha Kunj Park. In a recent Instagram post, Women Walk at Midnight, a volunteer-run initiative started by theatre artist Mallika Taneja, urged women to stroll together “tonight, tomorrow, next month, whenever, wherever”, so that “our neighbourhoods get used to looking at us”. Simultaneously, on the other side of the world, women are demanding criminal proceedings against the seven men from Cornell University, who drugged and gang-raped a 20-year-old girl in 2024, and were asked to submit mitigation essays by the Ivy League institution instead of facing disciplinary action. Internet sleuths trying to uncover the identity of the anonymous victim are being purposefully misled by other women online claiming to be Jane Doe in solidarity. When caught in a storm, women will always seek and shield each other.
