An inspiring look at two trailblazing women who shatter age barriers and rewrite rules of achievement.
When a forty-something woman demonstrated that she could hold a plank for 6:34 minutes in the gym, we crowed about how she had beaten everyone across age groups — below 45 and above 45 — and across genders. She was unchallenged for two weeks. Then came the real champ, Roshnie Bheemaiah, who held the plank for 7:02. Her age: 71.5. The only person who managed to beat her score, by 18 seconds, was a 49-year-old man. But it was Roshnie’s score that dazzled everyone. Mostly because we still carry, somewhere in our heads, an idea of what a woman past a certain age is supposed to be capable of. Roshnie’s plank simply refused to fit the idea. She’s currently the reigning champion for the ‘dead hang’ challenge too. I said to her, half in jest, that she should not compete in future challenges as she would be the winner each time. Her reply was quick and honest: “No way will I stop. I have worked far too hard to stop.” Her achievement, as she said at the prize distribution, came only through consistency. A body that strong doesn’t happen by accident at 71 — it is the residue of decades of reinvention, one discipline layered on another. She focused on her own fitness before she turned that discipline into a second career, becoming a popular fitness and aerobics instructor for fifteen years. Eighteen years ago, she began living part-time in Melbourne, and spent close to a dozen years cooking in the kitchen of her grandson’s school. During COVID, she also trained as a professional chef.
I’ll admit that seeing my timing — all of 1.5 minutes — sandwiched between the top scorers gave me a flicker of embarrassment. Then I remembered that when I first started planking ten years ago, my personal trainer had set my target at one minute. That was the number I’d always measured myself against. So 1.5 minutes wasn’t a disappointment at all — it was my personal best. I don’t think I want to try to chase several more minutes. But it’s worth considering how many of us hold back, not because we’ve hit our real limit, but because of a target someone else once set for us, and we never thought to raise it ourselves.
I think about strength a lot — physical strength like Roshnie’s, but also the quieter, harder-to-measure kind. The strength to ask for more. The strength to keep learning when you’ve already arrived. The strength to lead in rooms where women are rare. I saw all three strengths in one woman: Latha Reddy, who passed away recently.
Latha Reddy held her own in a field where women were scarce. As a career diplomat, she took on challenges with alacrity — none more so than when she was made India’s Deputy National Security Advisor and had to learn, almost overnight, to deal with hard-core insurgency and border security issues, a world away from the soft diplomacy she had known. She was responsible for extraditing the notorious gangster Abu Salem from Portugal, negotiated military agreements, and dealt with insurgency in Kashmir and with Maoists. Then, reinventing herself at 60, she became a self-described ‘cyber peace warrior,’ pushing for India to have a stronger voice in global debates on cyber security.
I was introduced to her by another strong and inspiring woman, my dear friend, Prathibha Prahlad, the renowned classical dancer and cultural visionary. Latha generously gave her time as a speaker on quite a few programmes I invited her to. I remember what she said at the Under the Raintree Women’s Cultural Festival in 2019. I moderated a power-packed panel on gender equity in the workplace, and asked Latha: Are women less aspirational? If so, why? What are the inner obstacles women must overcome to reach higher levels of executive management?
She replied, “The problem is women want to be perfectionists, want to control everything, and want to micromanage. The secret of men’s success is to delegate, delegate, delegate.”
Why do women volunteer less for challenging positions? I would say the reason is societal and family pressure. The foundation has to be laid — society and women have to be supportive, mentor and inspire young women.
“You must ask, learn and grow. I am happy to say at 68, I am still learning and growing. We must imbue girls with that spirit — of not only having to achieve, but to keep learning.”
She felt she never needed to dress like a man to be taken seriously. And she wasn’t wrong — she was elegant, graceful, and a force to reckon with, always in beautiful saris.
That brings me back to the train of thought about different kinds of strength. We tend to speak of women’s strength as though it were one thing — grit, resilience, or just toughness. But it takes as many forms as there are women. It is physical endurance at 71 that upturns assumptions about age. It is the discipline to keep asking questions at 68 instead of coasting on what you already know. It is choosing not to perform someone else’s idea of authority, and being powerful anyway, whether in a sari, a suit or shorts.
What connects these two strong women isn’t the shape their strength took, but the fact that neither of them waited to be told they were allowed to have it. And that is what women owe it to other women to pass on — not their examples to emulate, but permission to define strength for themselves. That is the real inheritance. Just be fully yourself.
PS: Donna Jean Wilde, a 58-year-old Canadian, holds the Guinness World Record for the longest female abdominal plank at 4 hours, 30 minutes, and 11 seconds, a feat she achieved in March 2024.
*Sandhya Mendonca, author, biographer, podcaster, and publisher at Raintree Media, offers a distinct female gaze of the world in this column.
