Bahar Dutt: Happy women make for happy moms

"I am full time writer, part time mother," says writer and journalist Bahar Dutt in our special series Moms Mean Business. "In India we just need to enjoy motherhood and not necessarily give up working."

Bahar Dutt is in conversation with Amrita Tripathi.

"When I go to the park I meet so many mothers who will say they’ll always ask, are you full-time mother, part-time? I always say, I’m a full-time writer, part-time mother. The Western jargon about motherhood …every mother sounds so overwhelmed! In India we’re very lucky we have all kinds of support systems. We are lucky to be in a country where you can get domestic help and it’s affordable, or you have your parents or in-laws — of course that comes with its own set of problems, but never mind that," Dutt says.

Moms Mean Business

I think in India we need to enjoy motherhood but not necessarily give up working. I know a lot of women who are doing ‘half-jobs’ or are working part-time or they would have stopped working. I know I’m not saying anything new and I know it’s easy for me to say that, but I think that a happy mother is a better mother. So I think it’s really important to go on working. That's my message for Mother’s Day.

On Raising a Child to Appreciate Nature

"I have a two year old daughter. You’re always conspiring in some ways on how to take your children to these beautiful places. I’ve been blessed to go up to the Arctic, go up to the forests of Indonesia, or including India, we’ve seen so many beautiful places in India. I was thinking how do I involve my child in this?"

"We decided, my husband and I, that we’re going to spend the next one year traveling across the world to all the animal migrations of the world. Now everyone says she’s only two years old, she’s not going to remember anything. All I can say, is by the time she’s five or six, some of these migrations may not even exist. So that’s the problem. I want her to be exposed to all of this. I want children to go out - we talk about nature deficit disorder. A lot of our children are going to face that. How do you increase that contact with nature and make an emotional connect? You can’t just go on preaching, that’s too boring."