25 stories of women that our readers loved in 2015

As it’s curtains down for 2015, we look back at everything that inspired and motivated us to march ahead towards another year. Here is a little dose of inspiration for you: stories of women that inspired us to put our best foot forward, take challenges head on and never give up!

HerStory brings you the most read and appreciated stories from 2015. Stay inspired!

1) “I became a mother at 17. I had to do all the household chores and then head straight to the fields. I would return home at dusk and get down to making dinner. We did not have any stove, so I had to cook on a wood fire chulha,” says Jyothi Reddy.

There was a time when Jyothi was earning a meager Rs 5 a day and today she is playing with millions as the CEO of Key Software Solutions in Phoenix, Arizona in USA.

Read the story here.

2) Priyanka Agarwal started early; by the age of 20 she knew she wanted to start a cosmetics line. While in college she worked on her plans but had to wait till she graduated.

This young entrepreneur shares her experience: “It’s important to give and take respect, especially when you are the youngest in the team and the boss. I like to keep the communication going, be patient, be assertive where necessary and praise talent. Until now, I haven’t faced or sensed problems of gender bias at work and hope that will continue.”

Read the story here.

3) Hoping to start her own venture some day, Harsha Kumar, AVP Product at Ola, has enjoyed working with young and emerging startups in the past. Harsha loves working with startups because, “Most good startups are flexible, take more risks and move fast, which aligns with how I work. The ability to see an instant outcome of your effort excites me, as well.”

Read the story here.

4) Paraplegic athlete Deepa Malik was given seven days to celebrate her last moments of walking. This Arjuna awardee says, “I was always out to prove myself. That became a habit – just to prove to the world that my medical condition has not let my life slip away from me.”

 Read the story here.

5) From the limelight of a successful career in Bollywood and Hollywood to the darkness of cancer. How Lisa Ray refused to bow before her dreaded illness and came out a survivor and an inspiration to cancer patients.

Read the story here.

6) Jyoti Janak Dhawale suffers from bilateral sensorineural hearing loss. “I can hear sounds with decibels of 80 and above. That is equivalent to the hoot of a railway engine. I follow conversations face to face – through lip reading. Otherwise, I strongly rely on the written word for communication. Also, I suffer from certain speech defects. I cannot pronounce letters like C, X and S. It is not just I; any person with this hearing disability will have a problem in pronouncing certain alphabets, and even following them,” she shares.

Life has not been easy for HIV-positive Jyoti, but she has taken it all in her stride and lived it to its fullest.

Read the story here.

7) CashKaro Co-founder Swati Bhargava is a girl from Ambala who started a successful cashback business in the UK with her husband and came back to India to start her entrepreneurial journey with CashKaro.

Recently, the company secured Rs 25-crore Series A round from Kalaari Capital and plans to go global soon.

Read the story here.

8) “Millions of Indian women stock their closets with stuff worth over one billion dollars every year and still have nothing to wear. Nearly a third of their closet is never worn and another third is worn once or twice at the most,” says Rashi Menda, Founder and CEO of Zapyle. Zapyle allows people to buy and sell pre-owned branded clothing.

Read the story here.

9) Pallavi Pareek raised the question of what success means for women entrepreneurs. With her own example, she showed us how a broken marriage is often seen as a measure of success for a woman in the society we inhabit.

Read the story here.

10) On the golden list of UPSC, one of the names this year was of Sanskriti Jain, the All India Rank number 11 who shared her passion to bring about change and how she made it to the A-list. She says that clearing the UPSC exams is not the way of measuring one’s success or failure.

Read the story here.

11) Archana Doshi, software engineer turned YouTube kitchen queen, is a prime example of how passion can be pursued from the kitchen too. Archana worked from home, managed to take care of her family, be financially independent and also be famous.

Read the story here.

12) Model and actor Taapsee Pannu stepped into the world of entrepreneurship with her venture, The Wedding Factory, to provide clients, “a refreshing experience that matches international standards and is within a budget too.” Taapsees’s idea of a perfect wedding is one where the guests soak in the ambience and take back a certain memory of how they felt and not just how great the food tasted. “We believe every wedding should have a unique story to present,” she says.

Read the story here.

13) Neha Puri’s pilot venture Cyber Chef is an app-based virtual marketplace curating home-cooked meals. A foodie herself, she shares how she realised the value of home-cooked food. “I lived away for five years and have missed home-cooked food. We found a lady though, who would serve us home-cooked meals that made for the happiest days for us,” Neha says.

Read the story here.

14) Swati Jain, tired of accommodating other people’s change in itinerary, or last minute cancellations in travel plans, decided to spread her wings and travel solo as a backpacker. She stepped out of her comfort zone and rediscovered life.

Read the story here.

15)  “It is always difficult to be a woman entrepreneur in your mid-20s, because you can get push back from people about the seriousness you have towards your venture. You really need to prove to family and friends that you have enough faith and dedication in the startup you are working on,” says Natasha Jain, Founder of Ruplee, a payment solution for the offline space. She shares the ups and downs of her own journey.

Read the story here.

16) Pune entrepreneur Ankita Shroff says, “A dream becomes a goal when action is taken towards its achievement. It’s my conviction that check-boxes are made, so that they can be ticked. This 26-year-old Founder of SAV Chemicals Private Limited is a professional manufacturer of cyanoacrylate adhesive (instant adhesive) Mxbon branded products for the consumer and industrial markets.

Read the story here.

17) Tara Sharma Saluja started her career as a model, and an actor. From a model mother to a model entrepreneur she has her own TV show on motherhood and parenting. While she had seen several talk shows, cookery shows and other such shows, she was yet to come across a TV show that spoke about motherhood and parenting. “I think being a mother has changed me in ways I never thought and imagined. I celebrate it and contrary to popular belief my career has flourished with motherhood,” says Tara.

Read the story here.

18) Four years ago, Sandhya Cherian lost her husband. He passed away in his sleep from a massive heart attack. The loss was not only huge but also very unexpected. “It took us awhile to accept this and move forward with our lives. I felt it was important for my kids to spend time with family back here in India, and hence I decided to return to Chennai two years ago from the US,” she says.

Overcoming her personal loss and the social taboos that she faced, Sandhya took control of her life and decided to pursue her dreams.

Read the story here.

19) Entrepreneur Hansa Sinha from Patna, who studied in school with Mahendra Singh Dhoni, almost died due to an abscess in the lungs while in college, but then joined hands with her competitor to start her company Genesys. A daughter, wife, and mother, she has lived life on her own terms. Hansa’s commendable resilience, ability to doggedly work hard, and change things for the better has taken her ahead in life.

Read the story here.

20) The story of how five women entrepreneurs from Bhendi Bazaar are leveraging Internet to change lives. Bhendi Bazaar, near Muhammad Ali Road in Mumbai, has also been home to the Muslim community of Maharashtra and Gujarat for decades. The Saifee Burhani Upliftment Trust has undertaken a project to revamp Bhendi Bazaar and build new modern-day structures to house the people and shops that have been a part of it for so long.

While the renovation is in progress, families have been moved to two transit homes in Mumbai, and this has opened new avenues for women of the community. It has allowed them to move freely, build networks, and start up from their own homes. Many of these women are even using the Internet to run their business.

Read the story here.

21) Manisha Raisinghani leads the technology and product side at LogiNext Solutions. Often, at business meetings, client briefings and networking events, people assume that Manisha’s male co-founder leads the technology. As the tech Co-founder of LogiNext she continues to stay on stop of her game.

Read the story here.

22) Ishita Malaviya is a one in a billion who went against the tide to become the first woman surfer in India. She also turned entrepreneur with her venture- The Shaka Surf CLub – which was born in an abandoned bar by the sea in the small village of Kodi Bengere of Udupi district in Karnataka.

Read the story here.

23) Ranchi girl Anugaya Vardhan moved to Bengaluru and started up with just Rs 7,000 in January 2013. Today the monthly turnover of her firm, Grabito, is a staggering Rs 10 lakh, something this young entrepreneur had never dreamt of.

Read the story here.

24) She started with her first venture in 2011 called DiscountBox.in. The entrepreneurial bug bit Yamini Dhote soon after completing her engineering from Jabalpur. DiscountBox.in provides discounts and coupons; but she wanted to go beyond that so she thought of providing cashbacks as well and with this thought Cashable.in was born in 2014.

Read the story here.

25) Apurva Purohit, CEO of FM network Radio City 91.1, published Lady You Are Not a Man- the Adventures of a Woman at Work, which went on to become a national bestseller.

She hates labels and does not like being called a feminist. “Labels are restrictive and limit your notions of what you think you can achieve,” she says. But she has been fighting to right skewed workplace gender balance ever since she started working herself.

Read the story here.