In The Business of Healthy Masculinity Pluriversal Masculinity: Shaping new worlds with Sahana Chattopadhyay
Welcome to this latest episode of In The Business of Healthy Masculinity.
How are you doing and being? Hit reply and let me know.
Firstly, many thanks as always to Anna Denardin for her amazing artistry and creativity, helping bring key insights each week to life.
Sahana Chattopadhyay is one of THE most important voices, and most amazing human beings, that I have been blessed to meet and get to know well over the years.
I have collaborated with Sahana in a number of spaces including the Hegemony Revealed and Beyond Hegemony series that we both co-hosted with polymath Trina Casey, as well as hosting Sahana on a number of my platforms previously.
However, at this specific juncture in and outside of business spaces, and with my clarified focus on healthy masculinity, I am excited to introduce you to Sahana today as follows:
Across generations, patterns of power and oppression reshape our realities—from colonial silences to the digital codes that define belonging today. My work lives at the seams of these stories: bearing witness to Gaza’s grief, unmasking the quiet violence of language, and inviting communities to reimagine futures beyond climate collapse and technofascism.
I believe in the courage of asking difficult questions—helping others name what’s unseen or unsaid—and in unravelling the architectures that normalize suffering. My writing is woven from rigorous research and lived experience, always reaching back for dignity, hope, and the pluriversal voices that dominant systems strive to erase. Through decolonial thinking, climate justice advocacy, and collaborative dialogue, I partner with those ready to interrupt business as usual. Together, we recover the possibility of care, solidarity, and imaginative resistance—because every act of witness can open a door.
I explore the following themes in my essays and articles as a gesture towards pluriversality:
Decolonization & epistemicide: reclaiming deliberately erased knowledge and highlighting epistemicide as a colonizer’s tool
Technofascism & digital colonization: showing how technology is devolving into technocracy to concentrate power in the hands of a few, leading to a global rise in fascism
Climate justice & degrowth: advocating for planetary wellbeing and challenging extractive paradigms that underlie the entire colonial and neocolonial processes
Social justice, dignity of labour & participatory democracy: placing human worth and shared decision-making at the heart of change
Empire’s playbook & language manipulation: revealing how words and narratives shape power
Facilitation, pattern-seeking & sense-making: nurturing genuine dialogue, seeing what unites across differences, across boundaries and borders of man-made cartographies.
If you, too, are searching for ways to build worlds where justice is ordinary, I hope my words light a small, persistent lamp along your path.
You can contact or follow Sahana’s work at the following:
Website - https://www.pluriversalplanet.in/home
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sahana2802/
Email - sahana2802@gmail.com
Can we truly grow from places of comfort?
I am always curious about the interplay of words, energies, thought processes etc and wonder how the above question lands with you?
“I’m out to disrupt the narrative of comfort that we have woven ourselves into.” - Sahana Chattopadhyay
Sahana shares this assertive quote as part of the following clip:
What comes up for you, not just in your head, but in your body when you read Sahana’s statement above?
For me it is the piercing clarity that so much of what we hold as ‘true,’ is actually an illusion. Many, many stories and experiences woven together and presented as ‘facts.’
Yet Sahana invites us to shed any sense of what is ‘normal.’
What does ‘normal’ mean to you today? To your organisation? Who gets to speak? Who gets shut down? Is your workplace really as ‘safe’ as you think it is?
An invitation to get #curious, and to be honest as you answer these questions for yourself.
For me, I feel that we can learn from a place of comfort, and that is important, but it is difficult to grow in comfort. What may you add or challenge at this juncture?
We want this to be a generative conversation as much as wisdom shared.
What has been done to us men in terms of conditioning, harm, and even unchecked power?
“What was done to the men? They had their empathy removed, they had their creativity killed, they had their love suppressed, they were oppressed into playing a role that capitalism demanded of them, so that they could serve the system of capitalism, for the capitalistic oligarchs at the top, to gain more profit out of less” - Sahana Chattopadhyay
This statement hit me in real-time as my whole body energetically reacted as Sahana spoke, and it sparked a recent International Men’s Day post from me which you can also find HERE.
I want to invite you to witness the empathy, care, and clarity that Sahana models as she delivers this message, at a time when the oligarch class as she calls them, seeks to divide us.
Us men have not been allowed to care deeply, to love publicly, to honour feelings with one another. That suppression of feeling is, I am 100% sure as I have experienced it, a key root cause to so much of our worldly dysfunction, and inside the workplace.
What are you thinking, feeling, and what are your thoughts? Please let us know by reply or in the comments.
The myth of institutional power
“The leaders at the top who dare to take a stand and say that “you know what, I’m okay to let my share prices drop but I’m not okay to let the ethos of my organization drop. How many shareholders can you please? Capital will run the moment you make one loss” - Sahana Chattopadhyay.
If you are a CEO or senior leader how do you react to the above quote? In your body, not just in your head?
If you got to choose how to respond rather than react (nod to Helen Amery‘s work), how differently might you receive this statement, and what different actions may result?
I still hear, way too often, that ‘meeting shareholders expectations’ is more important than acknowledging harm being caused as part of supply chain activities.
Are you a CEO or senior leader who has followed this thought process? If yes, please do share in the comments or let us know via DM. How we challenge the system and not each other is key.
I remember meeting Garry Ridge, ex CEO of WD-40 back in 2018 in San Diego, who joined me on Episode #5 of this podcast, and I asked him the question, “As a public company, how do you manage the short-termism of the financial markets, whilst trying to protect your culture?”
His direct reply was not all shareholders are for WD-40. He would only work with long-term investments and those have received the benefits with us of taking that long term view.
We can all challenge the collective illusion that short-termism is healthy.
Untapped collective power and intelligence within organisations
“Organizations have immense power to change things because they’re already a body, a community of people who have come together. Whether it’s 200, 2000, or 5000, they already are a group of people in a place, whether online or offline, under a certain umbrella banner doing certain things. Can those certain things not be achieved differently? More consciously (not like Conscious Capitalism!)” - Sahana Chattopadhyay.
Sahana speaks to THE number one reason why I still work within and serve corporate spaces, not just any corporates, but those that are part of our most unhealthy and harmful global supply chains.
Organisations have some of the biggest systemic leverage available, even if not from the top-down, as much as from the bottom-up.
What would you do and be different, if you let go of fear and the right to comfort for a day? Hit reply and let us know.
A reminder as to the financial as well as human benefits of creating conditions where people can feel, talk about fears, and unleash their full creative potential.
Inspiration of the Indian women’s cricket team
“Each one demonstrated the kind of loving masculinity that is inherently there in men, that it is inherently within each one of us unless it is forcibly ironed out of us by society” - Sahana Chattopadhyay.
Sahana shares this beautiful story about the Indian women’s cricket team as above which prompted a range of reflections within me, not least that accumulation and possessions do not = self-worth. They may represent external wealth, but not inner.
Also, I really appreciate how Sahana reminds us how our ‘loving masculinity,’ another great way to say healthy masculinity, is innate. We all have it, it has been squashed below and inside us due to socialisation and systems that are designed to keep us small and un-feeling.
Wrapping up
There is so much more I could share and about this conversation, but for now, we do hope that you got value from this update and the full conversation, and please do let us know what lands, what you may challenge, and anything else.
I invite you to listen/watch the full conversation above, or on the following platforms
* Spotify
* YouTube
A reminder that you can reach Sahana on any of the following:
Website - https://www.pluriversalplanet.in/home
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sahana2802/
Email - sahana2802@gmail.com
In your corner
Finally, a short note to advise that I am here if you are looking for a 1-1 Thinking Partner that can be in your corner by voice note, virtually, and in-person, I have found 5 x 60 minutes calls + unlimited voice note communication to work the best.
If you are ready to embrace the journey towards healthier masculinity, drop me a line at garry.turner@radicality.co.uk.
Next week I have the awesome Mark Edgar as my guest, an amazing Chief People Officer and human.
With much love and best regards
Garry Turner
+44 7928 979358
Get full access to In The Business of Healthy Masculinity at inbusinessofhealthymasculinity.substack.com/subscribe