If we had a penny for every time a movie milked male friendships to death — the overdone brother-from-another-mother trope — we’d have enough money to make one ourselves. A few that dare to flip the script, like Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, have already started fading out of memory. In real life, things are quite the contrary. “Many women I know receive more flowers from their female friends than the men they date,” laughs activist and writer Divya Kandukuri. Today, she will join early childhood development and education trainer Sneha Shetty to revisit and rekindle friendships that shaped their lives.

Participants sketch on a canvas

Women & Friendships, the duo’s travelling initiative, will make a pit-stop in Mumbai for the first time after successful stints in Bengaluru and Chennai. The seed was sown when Shetty saw her own mother find companions in a local housing society group called Naughty Naaris. “My mother admitted how her childlike mischief had succumbed to the responsibilities of raising a family. The close-knit group was an outlet for her,” Shetty recalls.