Saris to Suits envisions a different kind of pin-up girl — brilliant, beautiful and brown.
Patti Tripathi is a journalist, social justice advocate, and the founder of Saris to Suits, which seeks to empower girls to raise their voices and fight for justice.
Courtesy of Saris to Suits
She was born near the India-Nepal border, in her grandmother's village, and named named Pratibha, or "talent" in Hindi. Tripathi's family moved to the U.S. when Tripathi was 12, in large part because the financial burden of raising a daughter in India was so high: Though the country formally banned dowries, girls' families are still expected to pay ever-higher sums to grooms' families when hey marry off their daughters.
Because of that cultural tradition, which Tripathi felt keenly even growing up in the U.S., she said, "I always felt like I was a financial burden to my family, and I fought really hard to stand on my own two feet." In fact, she landed in a career as a reporter at Headline News.
But it was an experience on her Notre Dame college campus that sparked the idea for a Saris to Suits calendar, a fundraising and empowerment tool Tripathi's non-profit organization puts together each year. At Notre Dame, she was "the only Indian girl" chosen for a calendar of smart, community-oriented female students. When Tripathi decided she wanted to inspire other South Asian women with Saris to Suits, her calendar girl experience came immediately to mind.
"People said, 'You're crazy nobody's going to buy a calendar of fully-dressed women who are not Bollywood!'" But her first calendar was so popular that Tripathi came back this year with a second, this one a 16-month glossy filled with inspiring South Asian women, breathtaking photography and quotations each woman chose as inspiring her.
Dr. Hina Chaudhry was born in Pakistan, studied at Harvard, and teaches at one of America's most prestigious hospitals.
Courtesy of Saris to Suits
Chaudhry is a cardiologist, scientist, and entrepreneur with a bachelor's degree from MIT, a medical degree from Harvard, and a string of sought-after fellowships. She teaches as an associate professor of medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.
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