When Lakshmi Murthy was a teenager, her grandmother handed her a list of rules to follow during her periods. In a quiet act of rebellion, she sat on her grandmother’s lap and smiled, “Will you have to take a bath again now?”

That moment, simple yet profound, was the spark. Born in an orthodox family from Karnataka, Lakshmi grew up in the company of her widowed grandmother, who was just 21 when she lost her husband in 1930. Her strict beliefs around purity and menstruation left a lasting impression on Lakshmi.

“My anxieties about menstruation stemmed from my interaction with her. The fact that it was a taboo issue disturbed me. I carried that discomfort through adolescence — and it eventually became the reason I began working to fight taboos and raise awareness,” she says.

Today, at 64, Lakshmi — fondly known as ‘Pad Grandma’ — is a pioneer in the field of sustainable menstruation, whose work has touched countless lives across rural India. Her decades-long efforts were recently recognised when she received the prestigious ‘Pride of NID’ award from President Droupadi Murmu at her alma mater, the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad.

She thought she’d make pots

Lakshmi’s journey into design was itself an act of defiance. After her family moved to Mumbai, she spent her high school and junior college years fighting to wear trousers, keep short hair — and eventually, to join NID. “My mother opposed it because it was only a diploma course back then,” she recalls.

At NID, she studied industrial design, specialising in ceramic design. Here, she also met her late husband — a Rajasthani agricultural engineer who came to NID to study design for agriculture — and after graduation in 1986, moved to Udaipur.

“There were many challenges. Connectivity was poor — we only had metre gauge trains to Ahmedabad and Delhi, and just one flight to Mumbai and one to Delhi. Apart from that, there was the prevalent patriarchy. People called me bhabhiji, didi, or Lakshmiji. They didn’t understand my work. My attire was very different from the locals. I wore trousers and shirts in a place where women wore saris with goonghats (veils),” she shares.

Her liberal in-laws, especially her mother-in-law, who worked in education, were a blessing. But the lack of ceramic design opportunities in Udaipur meant she had to carve a new path. She began organising artist camps, helping potters and artisans create new products, and soon started working with the NGO Seva Mandir, designing visual communication tools for rural communities. “I could have moved back to Ahmedabad and pursued ceramics, but at the time, having a long-distance marriage just wasn’t considered acceptable,” she adds.

Sketching periods into the picture

Lakshmi’s first real brush with

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