One man’s small idea has meant a big leap for women’s hygiene, inspiring Bollywood to make a biopic starring Akshay Kumar
ARUNACHALAM MURUGANANTHAM’S CURIOSITY and defiance have brought him both infamy and fame. “In the early marriage days, you try to impress your wife. I did the same,” says Muruganantham in the popular TED Talks video uploaded on YouTube. So he brought Shanthi a packet of sanitary napkins, after he saw her using a rag cloth which was so dirty he wouldn’t use it to clean his two-wheeler. Only Shanthi wasn’t thrilled that he’d cut into their monthly household budget. The Coimbatore-based school dropout and welder then decided to make a pad on his own. Unable to find volunteers in his family or in the local medical college to test his product, he became a guinea pig himself. This, Muruganantham claims, makes him the first man anywhere to wear a sanitary napkin. For five days, he fixed a rubber bottle filled with goat’s blood to his hip and connected it to a tube which led directly to the pad. “The messy days, the lousy days, that wetness. My God, it’s unbelievable. I bow down in front of any woman who goes through that,” said Muruganantham to applause from the TED Talks audience in Bengaluru.
This story is from the February 19, 2018 edition of India Today.
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This story is from the February 19, 2018 edition of India Today.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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