Venu Gupta is a mighty force

Her mission: to amplify the spirit of marginalized individuals and communities

When Venu Gupta was in middle school, a self-described “chubby Indian kid” in a very white suburb of Chicago, she swore to herself that if she ever had kids of her own, she would show them that “the world is a lot bigger than the 30 people it feels like run your world when you're 12 years old.” Specifically, her plan was to pull them out of school and travel the world. Earlier this year, she did just that, as she, her husband, and her children — both in middle school — embarked on a year-long trip to twelve countries, from Vietnam to South Africa.

Here’s how Venu tells her career story:

“The throughline in my career is a commitment to building, connecting, and amplifying the spirit of marginalized individuals and communities. I’ve used whatever I can leverage — love, righteous anger (often not so righteous), coaching, facilitating, consulting, resource mobilization, and more — to have the greatest impact. I founded VGA Consultancy, a coaching and consulting firm, and Solidarity Futures, as vehicles for greater individual, organizational, community, and country well-being.

I have worked in and with organizations across many sectors — law, higher ed, foundations traditional institutional nonprofits, and grassroots organizations. I’m most proud of my work when I’m part of the effort to build motivation and structure for individuals and organizations to be more values-aligned, internally and externally.”

- Venu Gupta

I met Venu, on Zoom, when she was in Tanzania (like you do). She was just starting to dip her toe back into her professional life, and had heard about me through a mutual connection. As we talked, we realized pretty quickly that we liked each other a whole lot and would be in each other’s lives for a long time. I was eager to interview her for this newsletter, and we quickly arranged a time, only to be repeatedly thwarted by weak internet connections. What follows is part one of an edited transcript of the conversation we had across multiple Zoom sessions; I’ll send part two tomorrow.

Get ready for a free-ranging conversation that covers everything from the nature of power to longing to fit in, being a pregnant woman in America, and the paradox of choice — with references to LA Law, X-Files, and Never Have I Ever, because, of course.

Part 1: “That LA Law, man!”

AMANDA: I want to know, when you were a little girl, what you wanted to be when you grew up.

VENU: A lawyer. That LA Law, man! That LA Law, it worked. Harry Hamlin, he was like the epitome of hotness when I was in sixth grade.

Harry Hamlin - hubba hubba

AMANDA: That is amazing because my husband wanted to be a lawyer because of Perry Mason...TV makes people want to be lawyers, is my theory.

VENU: There was a study that Gillian Anderson, in The X-files — that alone increased the number of women in STEM by some percentage.

Part 2: “Middle school power politics are not to be underestimated.”

AMANDA: So, you always wanted to be a lawyer. What do you think it was? I mean, you thought you might meet Harry Hamlin, or....

VENU: I knew that a brown chubby girl was not going to intersect with Harry Hamlin. But it seemed heroic. I think there was the drama piece of it; whatever the story was, they were on the right side of it. I think I also felt like I didn't have a lot of power, if one can feel that... I think middle school power politics are not to be underestimated. And so I think there was something about having power and having people have to listen to me and fighting for somebody who might not have that. Maybe.

AMANDA: What was your family unit that you grew up with?

VENU: Me, my mother and father, my brother...and my grandmother often lived with us. And  then, my savior I think, in middle school and high school, was that we had a very tight-knit family friend group. So almost every other weekend we met with this friend group and whatever shitty thing was going on in school or however othered I felt in school, there I was, just another cousin-like person running around. And it was so anchoring...I don't look back on my childhood as like, “Oh, it was the four of us.” I feel like I was part of this roving nerdy band of Indian kids in the suburbs.

“I was part of this roving nerdy band of Indian kids in the suburbs.”

- Venu Gupta

AMANDA: Okay, that's a new TV show right there: The Roving Nerdy...

VENU: —Yeah, it's a sad one. It's a sad one. It's not Never Have I Ever, I'll tell you that. It's more, Never Did I.

AMANDA: What suburb were you roving?

VENU:  Naperville, Illinois, which is about 45 miles outside of Chicago, maybe 35. Just a handful of kids of color in my class...and as a kid, I just didn't feel comfortable. Naperville was a very white town, and I mostly had white friends, but it always felt tenuous. When I think about my hometown this is what I think about.

I just wanted so hard to fit in... I remember one day I was in my parents' bedroom and they had this red, maybe mahogany teak furniture and there were those two big round mirrors. I don't know, it was the style back then, I think. And I remember putting white powder on my face, and trying to take off my mole. I was just like, “What would it be like if I were white? A white person wouldn't have a mole.” And it's so absurd; it’s so absurd now that I think about it. Why would I try to take it off? It was so...barbaric. It was like this violence. And I didn't look white, I just looked like a brown person with talcum powder on my face! But that was how deep the longing was.

Part 3: “I've been thinking about power and what it means to have it and what a corrupting force it is.”

AMANDA: It’s interesting that you saw potentially becoming a lawyer, whether consciously or not, as a form of power, because I'm realizing that in my suburb, where I was growing up, outside of Washington DC, I think I equated stardom with power for women, because I wanted to be an actress. 

It was like, “Which women got to be on the covers of magazines?” Which women did people take the time to interview and pay attention to? Who got the photo shoot?Actresses. I think I also felt power when I performed...I don't think I'm the only person to have made this connection, but I think for me, acting was like a break from performing perfection in real life. 

But it’s just interesting because we’re different people, different childhoods, all of that, and yet it's interesting to think if we were both looking for what symbolized power to us. We thought we wanted our future to be something that gave us more power.

VENU: Can I ask you, why do you think we wanted power at such a young age? Do you think that's an American thing? Do you think it's that we felt some deep loss of power? There are lots of countries in which women don't have power. I mean, probably every single one...

AMANDA: First of all, it's in the rearview mirror at age 47 that that's my interpretation of why I wanted to do that as a kid. Maybe I just loved acting.  And maybe for you it just seemed like lawyers had cool lives. But also I think for me, in some way it was also... I didn't think that my parents seemed happy at work. I'm an only child. And my recollection is that at dinner, they were always talking about the stress of their work day. They both worked outside the home in offices. So I think, you know, in some ways, me wanting to be an actress was also like, well, “I don't want that. They don't seem to be having a good time.”

I don't know, it's such a complicated question that you asked because it asks us to somehow reconcile with the layers of what we can see now and what we know now versus what we saw then and knew then. And certainly it was much later in life that I ever would have put the word power to it.

But what about you? Do you think there's more to it than that?

VENU: I don't know if it's more. But I've been thinking about power and what it means to have it and what a corrupting force it is. And why it's so seductive for so many people, not for everybody, but many — something in the way we're wired. And it seems particularly sought after in the United States and maybe Western European countries. And I guess that to me is potentially derivative of not having a more spiritual centered life, where something else is more important than power.

AMANDA: Do you know Gloria Feldt? 

Venu: No. 

AMANDA: She runs an organization called Take the Lead Women and has written books — I think a lot of people know her as the former CEO and president of Planned Parenthood. And then this act of her life has been about galvanizing more women to be leaders. But what's interesting is that in her most recent book, Intentioning, she talks about the word “power,” and she talks about how a lot of people assume or interpret the word power to mean “power over,” right? And that a lot of women in America for example, haven't sought power, because the idea of “power over” other people is unappealing. And so she talks about how the kind of power she sees women wanting is the power to.

VENU: That gave me chills. Because you know who that reminds me of is Audre Lorde and bell hooks and how they talk about the sisterhood....I will say that I think over the course of my years — I'm 49, I'll be 50 in December — I think that it's gone back and forth. The angrier I get, the more power I want over.

AMANDA: That's interesting.

VENU: And I don't like it. I was angry for a very, very long time. And then during the Trump campaign and after Trump got elected, I was seething. I have anxiety and OCD and I take medication for it, and all of that was working fine until Trump got elected, and then my base level of anxiety just went up. And I would find myself having panic attacks. And then that anger — much like Yoda says, that anger, it leads to hatred. Being out of the country has helped a ton but I've really had to work on not giving up my power that way.

Part 4: “I'm going to go with you and I'm going to prove that the Ganesha statues are not drinking milk.”

AMANDA: I would love to hear you talk, to the extent that you're comfortable, about what your spiritual life is like.

VENU: Yeah, thank you for asking that. So I may cry — one, because it's very important to me, but also because I'm menopausal. So both of those things together might mean tears.

So, my spiritual life. I grew up as a Hindu. I feel really connected culturally to Hinduism. I feel really lucky to be born into Hinduism as a religion, it was a really good grounding in what it means to be able to hold things as real and not real...

I think my first real spiritual experience was in India. I would sometimes just go visit India and I was with my uncle and aunt and I was staying there and they're like, “Come on, all the Ganeshas are drinking milk.” All the Ganesha statues across the country were drinking milk. And I was like, “Yeah, fuck that. There’s some big lie happening. I'm going to go with you and I'm going to prove that the Ganesha statues are not drinking milk.”

A statue of the Hindu god, Ganesha

Being adventurers, my uncle and I agreed to go visit the closest Ganesh statue. On our way, he bought a liter of milk — no surprise, there was a a milk shortage in India that day. On our drive over, I was devising ways to ensure not a single drop of milk escaped from the spoon when I held it up to the inert trunk. We arrive and there’s nothing really notable about the thigh-high statue placed on the dirt floor, except for the 100-person line standing adjacent to it. We wait, and while we wait, again, I’m thinking about how all the people before me are being duped by some psychosomatic force that is causing them to subconsciously spill their milk as they hold it up to this inert elephant trunk. 

You can see where this is headed right? Standing ahead of my uncle in line, I arrived at the statue, I mean Ganesh. I nervously and determinedly poured milk into my tablespoon-sized spoon. I walked up to the statue and crouched into a squat. Despite my best efforts, my hand was shaking a bit. I mean, what if I was wrong? What if I was in the presence of an actual miracle? How would I even make sense of that? The people who fed the Ganesh statue before me seemed satisfied but no one was releasing screams of divine joy.

I raised my hand, but wasn’t even quite sure where to put the spoon at the base of the trunk, at the mouth. Nobody had said where to put the spoon! Feeling the pressure of the line behind me, I held the spoon of milk to Ganesh’s mouth, watching beneath the spoon to make sure no milk was dropping. I looked back at the milk in the spoon, and I watched it steadily disappear. Yup, it disappeared. All of it. I held a spoon of milk up to a rock, and it disappeared.

And like the 100 people before me I stood up, a bit confused, and walked ahead so the next person could feed Ganesh.    

I think that I sort of had both my spiritual life and my cultural life very connected. They were part and parcel of one another until I became pregnant with my second child. And then I had what I call “my little nervous breakdown.” During my pregnancy, my husband and I were having a very difficult time in our marriage; one parent on both sides had been diagnosed with challenging health conditions; and mental health challenges that I had been having for a long time exponentially escalated.

After I had my daughter, things got worse. My anxiety and OCD went into overdrive. I was panicked 24-7. I couldn't really function. I had tried to tell my doctors, including my OB-GYN, but nobody really listened. That's a whole other story of about what it's like to be a pregnant woman in the United States, even when you have every resource available to you. So how shitty must it be for somebody who has even fewer resources and access than I had…

So after I had her, things got worse. Way worse. Because I'm incredibly privileged economically, I was able to go to psychiatrists, intuitives, therapists, a chronic fatigue specialist, Reiki healers, and acupuncturists. Most important, I had a rock-solid emotional support network, starting with my husband and father, and extending to friends who are like family. And I got better.

And a huge part of what helped get me through was my discovery of a Zen Buddhist named Thich Nhat Hanh. Reading his work. I read a book of his called Old Path White Clouds, just a few pages every day, and along with everything else, I healed, and will always be healing, I guess.

And then I realized that just given my wiring, that growing a greater affinity for my spiritual life was really the only way that I was going to increase my happiness. That there had to be something within me. That in order to be happier, I was gonna have to find a way to be really grounded and have a lot of self command.

At this point, we lost our internet connection. When we reconnected the following week, Venu had traveled from Tanzania to Cape Town, South Africa. Stay tuned for part two of our conversation tomorrow. (Edited 9/8 to add a link to part two, which is now live!)

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