Why the future is feminine

If there’s one word that will define 2025, it’s women. Not as a label or a cause, but as an unstoppable force reshaping every field — from sport to startups, from storytelling to leadership. Everywhere you look, women are no longer waiting to be invited to the table. They are building their own, often on their own terms.

Kiran Manral’s new book ‘The Game Changers’ arrives right at the cusp of this shift. It’s not a feminist call to arms or a glossy self-help guide. It’s a mirror — held up to the messy, magnificent, multi-tasking Indian woman who refuses to fit into a box. She is ambitious yet empathetic, exhausted yet unyielding, flawed yet unflinching. And in that contradiction lies her quiet revolution.

Consider women’s cricket. Once dismissed as a novelty, it has become impossible to ignore. Packed stadiums, endorsement deals, live telecasts — it’s not just a sporting moment, it’s a cultural one. When the Indian women’s team won, the triumph reverberated far beyond the boundary. It told every girl that the bat and the briefcase, the pitch and the boardroom, are all fair game.

With her new book, Manral captures the moment women have stopped asking for permission — to lead, to play, to build, to simply be. She draws a sharp, almost poetic, parallel between the women who play and the women who build. The cricketer and the entrepreneur share the same DNA: both have had to fight for visibility, credibility, and access to opportunity. Both have faced scepticism disguised as advice. And both, in their own quiet way, are redrawing the map of aspiration.

But what makes Manral’s writing powerful is that she refuses to paint these women as superheroes. She doesn’t romanticise their struggle or sanctify their success. She knows revolutions rarely come with banners and hashtags. They unfold in kitchens, in WhatsApp groups, in cramped offices and late-night commutes. They take shape when a woman asks for a pay raise, when she walks out of a bad marriage, when she starts a business from her bedroom. They are built on the everyday courage of choosing oneself.

Reading Manral, I am reminded of how the modern Indian woman doesn’t want to be glorified or victimised — she just wants to be seen. She can lead a meeting and forget her child’s tiffin. She can smash a century and still check in on her parents. Her power lies not in perfection but in persistence. Her feminism is not angry — it’s pragmatic, lived, and often laced with humour.

The women of 2025 aren’t asking to “lean in” to systems built for men. They are redesigning those systems entirely. They’re rejecting the old hierarchies that celebrated burnout and bravado, the super-woman, and offering a new template grounded in empathy, adaptability, and collaboration. The traits once dismissed as “soft” are now the ones saving businesses, democracies, and relationships.

This is what Manral calls the “feminine future”. It’s not about flipping the patriarchy and placing women at the top — it’s about rebuilding power itself. It’s about leading without ego, nurturing without guilt, winning without cruelty. It’s about saying no without apology.

And that’s why her book feels like the story of our times. It’s a chronicle of women who no longer fit neatly into stereotypes: the homemaker who invests in a startup, the founder who becomes a mother on her own terms, the athlete who turns down a movie deal to mentor the next generation. These are the women who will define this decade.

In a culture obsessed with external validation, there’s something radical about being enough for yourself. That, ultimately, is Manral’s message. Women don’t need saving. They don’t need spotlights. They just need space — to play, to fail, to rebuild, to thrive.

The shift is everywhere if you know where to look: in the startup founder disrupting industries; in the athlete winning hearts; in the storyteller like Manral herself, who is documenting the zeitgeist with a mix of mischief and gravitas. Together, they form the mosaic of modern India — a country finally learning to see its women not as symbols or slogans, but as forces of transformation.

Women don’t just represent the future, they are the future. And in 2025, that future is already here — fearless, funny, and unapologetically feminine.

Because the future isn’t female — it’s feminine. And that’s what makes it so revolutionary.

— The writer is an acclaimed author