Deep within, everyone has the courage to explore and test their highest potential, but then, there are steps to take, and snap decisions that make us win. It could take days, years, but the moment comes.

It was in January 2016, that an artist, travelling on a Mumbai local train, Reva Pandit, saw a woman looking out of the window. For some reason, the woman caught her attention, and she couldn’t look away. When the woman caught her staring she obviously gestured “What’s up?”

And that’s when the artist walked up to Seema Harindran Puthyapurayil, a software designer.

Reva described that she drew a picture of a woman some time ago, who looked exactly like Seema.

She showed her the picture and Seema couldn’t believe it. “It was an intricate, mesmerising, black and white sketch of a lady, who looked a lot like me even in the absence of colour. The same wide nose, large eyes, long chin and m-shaped hairline,” she .

They didn’t want to let go of something that was so powerful. That’s when they came up with the idea of bringing Reva’s painting to life.

“All my life I’ve been ridiculed for being dark skinned. The fair skin obsession in India doubled my self-esteem issues as a teenager and I was constantly discriminated against because of my dark skin. The word “kali” (a dark skinned girl) haunted me because it was the word used by most people to mock my skin colour. It reduced my identity to my skin colour and I’ve spent my whole life running away from this word. Until I met Reva Pandit, who completely flipped this word around for me, and added a whole new perspective to my life.”

“And just like that, she changed the definition of the word “kali” in my life. For the first time, someone had called me Kali (capitalised, meaning the goddess Kali) and I felt nothing but proud.”

“I had spent my whole life feeling sorry about being called kali and never once thought that I could just think of it as being like goddess Kali. “

“Reva needed to walk into my life with a smile and tell me that I looked like her interpretation of Kali.”

“The sketch Reva had made was pen on paper, so on my way to her friend’s place, I wondered what I would look like. I thought she would probably paint my face white and then paint the black strokes over the white base. Her Kali also looked fierce and scary and I wondered if I could pull it off,” Seema wrote.

“No one intentionally puts a scary picture of themselves out there. I wondered about the audience of the pictures she would take and if the audience would dismiss me as too scary. Just at that moment, I remembered that the main point of this was Reva’s art and not me and I told my thoughts about appearances to take a hike.”

“The final product was magical. I was spellbound when I saw myself at the end. It was unconventional, scary and fierce. It raised a proverbial middle finger to our beauty standards because we unwittingly also apply the same standards to goddesses.”

“So screw beauty standards. Be you. Channel a goddess. Heck, be a lovely, fierce, angry, empowered, Indian Goddess. There’s one inside each one of us.”

The conversation is taken from here.