Little Women

“Little Women” movie was out in theaters! It was a very special moment for me for multiple reasons. The novel “Little Women”, by Louisa May Alcott, on which the movie is based, was the first novel I ever read. I was in fifth grade then, and very impressionable, and had found the book, written almost a hundred years before my birth, to be quite progressive. It was inspiring to see that the girls in the book all had dreams and interests and talents that they followed passionately.  I recollected a lot of that novel despite having read the book so long ago. I was excited to see how they picturized it, and wasn’t disappointed. Another reason the movie was special was  because it was filmed in the area that we have lived for the past several years, in Concord, Massachusetts, where it was kind of based in the novel to begin with.

While watching the movie as an adult, I reconnected with my reflections as a child, filling in the blanks of questions left unanswered or “aha!” moments of nuances not that well understood the first time due to inexperience. Even more fascinating to me, as an adult, were the new relatable moments in the movie. Like how the movie reminded me of the Little Women in my life. Especially the scene in the attic when the March Sisters recruit Laurie to their acting club despite him being a “real boy”!

You see, for a reasonably long time, like about ten years, along with some very creative friends, I worked with a team of kids who participated in global, creative problem solving challenges provided by Destination Imagination. As a part of the challenges, they have to come up with original stories and screenplays and perform them with costumes and props, music and dance. The props could be technical, or even science experiments and demos. Think of it as a STEAM Acting Club. Over the years, they built fascinating things integrated into their original stories like a mechanical sine wave rotating a fan, a water filtration system, a fruit battery, a robotic model of a nano-bot based on raspberry pi, arduino programmed model of a DNA showing CRISPR gene editing - though the most memorable one, which got them the highest accolade and warmed many hearts, was a giant 6ft x 6ft model of a beating heart in which their story used a nano-bot to remove the plaque!

The team had more girls, whom I was referring to as my Little Women, with “Laurie” who made the mix differently interesting. From the time they were about seven or eight years old until eighteen, it was a joyous roller-coaster ride to see them follow and build on their passions, and become the confident, driven young women. Though today’s girls don’t have the same hurdles and challenges as the protagonists from 1868, Jo March’s line in the movie resonates even in today’s day and age.“Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they've got ambition, and they've got talent, as well as just beauty.”

(Note: This most famous line from the movie is not in the original book. It has been taken from Alcott’s other book “Rose in Bloom”).