What is Streelok? And what does the name even mean?

Streelok is an initiative started with the intent to help Marathi women across the world gain knowledge and insight about menstrual health and hygiene that they can use in their daily lives.

It is a channel for women to understand better how menstrual health works and how it is intimately related to sexual and reproductive health.

It is a way out for women who struggle to find modern, scientific information about these taboo subjects on the internet in their native language.

It is the first digital platform on menstrual health in Marathi. A woman is referred to as stree in Marathi, while a lok could mean anything between a community, a people, or a distinct group. 

How did it begin? Audio it is.

The Streelok Podcast is the first offering in my project. I launched it on International Women’s Day this year, which is 8 March 2022. This is the first-ever Marathi podcast that talks about menstrual hygiene. Streelok invites girls and women of a wide range of ages to share their stories, struggles and experiences of menstrual hygiene and produces original insights into how the science manifests in our society.

With five episodes out, Streelok has reached 500+ downloads, and that is an inspiring thing for me. More than a billion people in the world understand English, but there are fewer than 100 million Marathi speakers across the globe. Thus, the addressable market for a Marathi podcast is quite small. Podcasts in Marathi are relatively few, and it is challenging to address the new market, which is very nascent at the moment.

But that makes me think that I am the first mover, and I just love to capitalise on that. Over the next few quarters, I want to expand from one podcast to a content platform with a mix of digital products on women's health in Marathi.

The motivation behind this project. From kalam-wali bai to cup-wali bai.

A few events in my personal life motivated me to create digital content around menstrual health in Marathi. Like every woman, I have had my struggle managing my periods. Further, the subject is still taboo in the community.

During the second lockdown in September 2020, I ordered a menstrual cup for myself. After using it for five months and experiencing the benefits of a menstrual cup, I wrote down my thoughts, and in the flux of a moment, decided to post it on Facebook, to check how my friends feel about it. I was surprised by the response, and it nudged me to communicate my thoughts more engagingly. This gave birth to a Facebook Live I did in 2021, on my experience of using a menstrual cup, in Marathi. It reached a much wider audience than the original post, I was overwhelmed by the response.

Queries poured in, not just from women, but from men, too. Women from different age groups reacted and engaged. This inspired me to work on it in further detail. I went on to make a few more videos, this time on a YouTube channel, in which I talked about more ways to use the menstrual cup, things to keep in mind while choosing its size, the science behind menstruation, and so on.

Things changed drastically when BBC Marathi, a popular digital platform featured a story on the challenge that I had taken up. This story got a massive 76k views.

Now, friends who used to address me as kalam-wali bai—which is a colloquial term for a woman who is a passionate journalist—have now started referring to me as cup-wali bai (which means a woman who advocates the menstrual cup), associating me with the cup movement.

Do I need to wait for any more motivation? This is a rhetorical question!

This series of events made me realise that there is an audience for the knowledge about menstrual health in the community if presented in modern, digital and engaging ways. and in regional language. 

There is an enormous amount of digital content available on menstrual hygiene, but it is only for those who understand English. Most women in my state, or most Marathi women in and around the community, do not understand English well. They miss out on being aware of a very important part of their lives.

I am looking for collaborations to fill that gap by making Streelok a go-to platform for every question related to menstrual hygiene for Marathi speaking community.

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“To be informed is to be empowered!”