Sanjana Sanghi recently participated in the prestigious Women in Power Conference (WIPC) at the Harvard Kennedy School. She headlined a specialized Arts and Advocacy Panel and lead a ‘Lunch and Learn’ session. The actress shared her experience of the same with Bollywood Hungama in an exclusive conversation.
“It’s definitely difficult to sum up in words,” said Sanjana when asked about her experience. “I was a very academic child growing up. As we all know, Harvard is treated as the mecca of academia and intellectualism. When I received their email, I realized that they recognized and summed up my work within cinema and social impact; the work that I have been doing since over a decade.”
She added, “That felt like a significant moment for me personally. You spend your 20s just keeping your head down and doing the work. And you are never taking a moment to acknowledge how far one has come or what one’s contributions have been; at least I don’t. The panel has many incredible filmmakers and actors as well and we really just focused on how movies and storytelling have the potential and power to drive positive change and impact people’s lives in a visceral way.”
What stayed with Sanjana the most was that very naturally during all her answers, one character or the other from her films came up. “I don’t think I had realized how much Kizie in Dil Bechara or Manjari in Dhak Dhak or Sakshi in Kadak Singh have taught me as Sanjana. I think in playing all of these girls I have learnt so much and they have impacted me for who I am today.”
The Dil Bechara actress was also pleasantly surprised to know that people over there keenly followed her work. “There were people from all countries present in Women in Power conference,” she said. “You don’t realize how much Hindi cinema travels. So many people had watched all of these films on different streaming platforms with subtitles and not felt like it was not their story. Seeing that they had followed me on Instagram and known my work, really stayed with me. I don’t enter these places having that expectation at all. At best, you feel you will be able to tell them about your work and then they might discover it. But to know and feel that they already had a relationship with it really stayed with me.”
Sanjana’s stint with social work started off during her student days at Lady Shri Ram College in Delhi University where she did her under-graduation from 2014 to 2017. “Delhi University has this compulsory program where you have to do some kind of social service,” she said. “That’s where I started teaching underprivileged children. It could have just been a thing that you do in college but for me it grew into something much bigger. In teaching those children at an NGO called Aarohan back in Delhi, I learnt that education has such a power to change people’s lives; it changed mine for sure. It opened opportunities that I never thought would be possible for me.”
That’s how her interest grew in philanthropy. “I started with teaching just 20 children and it grew to 100 and 200. That’s when Save The Children learnt about the work that I was doing and they on-boarded me for their youth advocate for education. And then the UN ultimately recognized my work and appointed me officially, which has given me the wings to fly,” she said and added that this also lead to her association with The Rockefeller Foundation and The World Bank.
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