If you have ever attended a nursing pinning ceremony in India, you know the moment. The lights dim. Young women carrying small brass lamps, faces lit gold from below. They recite the Nightingale Pledge. Somewhere in the audience, a mother wipes her eyes with the corner of her saree because her daughter has just become the first nurse in their family’s history. The lamp is small. The promise it carries is enormous.
I have stood in many such auditoriums. As a Director of Nursing, I now stand on the other side of that ceremony — among the senior nurses watching the next generation arrive. I want to write to you tonight, the young nurse holding that lamp, and tell you something I wish someone had told me when I was you: the profession you are stepping into is not the profession your seniors entered. It is wider, it is brighter, and it is finally, after decades, beginning to make room for you.
This year’s International Council of Nurses theme, “Our Nurses. Our Future. Empowered Nurses Save Lives,” is a sentence written for the woman holding that lamp. It says, plainly, that the future of healthcare belongs to her. But to understand what that future feels like, look first at the women who have already carried its weight.
I think of Annie. She trained in Kerala thirty years ago and came north for her first posting and never left. She has caught more babies than she can count, somewhere past two thousand, in labour rooms that are often crowded, occasionally short of staff, and always alive with the particular kind of waiting only a maternity ward knows. She does the things doctors don’t always have time for. She shows a first time mother how to latch her baby. She teaches a terrified father how to swaddle. She demonstrates kangaroo mother care to a grandmother who has never heard the term, but who instinctively understands it the moment skin meets skin. “When a baby is born,” Annie says, “a mother is born too. Sometimes she needs more help learning to be a mother than the baby needs learning to be a baby. That teaching is also nursing.” The American midwife Ina May Gaskin once wrote, “Whenever and however you intend to give birth, your experience will impact your emotions, your mind, your body, and your spirit for the rest of your life.” Annie has lived that truth from the other side of two thousand beds.
I think of Sunita, who stands at the head of a Delhi ICU. During the second COVID wave, she lost a colleague to the virus and went back to work the next morning. “I cried in the changing room, then I washed my face, then I went back. That is nursing.” That is also leadership in its rawest, most uncelebrated form — the kind young nurses inherit not in a classroom but in a corridor at 3 a.m.
What Annie and Sunita share, beyond the uniform, is something quietly enormous. They teach. Ask any Indian family to remember the first hours of their child’s life and they will describe a doctor for thirty seconds and a nurse for thirty minutes. It is the nurse who places the baby on the mother’s chest in the golden hour. It is the nurse who teaches the latch. It is the nurse who shows the father how to test a bath’s temperature with the inside of his elbow. It is the nurse who circles the danger signs on a discharge sheet and says, “if the breathing looks like this, bring her back immediately.” This is parent education in its purest form, and in India it is delivered overwhelmingly by nurses. Florence Nightingale, in her Notes on Lying In Institutions of 1871, called maternal nursing the most consequential nursing of all. A century and a half later, she is still right.
And here is what is changing for you. The corporate hospital sector in India — the world in which I work, and the world many of you will join — is finally building career ladders that match what nurses have always done. The Nurse Practitioner in Obstetrics, the Nurse Practitioner in Neonatology, the certified lactation consultant embedded in the NICU, the childbirth educator running antenatal classes for mothers in week thirty two, the fetal medicine nurse coordinating across scans and counselling, the IVF nurse coordinator who walks couples through the hardest year of their lives, the clinical nurse specialist on the labour floor who is the first responder to any obstetric emergency — these are not far-off Western roles you read about in journals. These are opportunities that exist in Indian corporate maternity and child care today. They will be staffed by your generation.
The doors do not stop there. There is a path from bedside to charge nurse to unit manager to Assistant Director to Director of Nursing. There are clinical educator tracks for nurses who love teaching. There are quality and patient safety leadership roles where a nurse, finally, sits at the table where decisions are made about how care is delivered. There are infection control specialists, simulation educators, breastfeeding clinic leads, paediatric advanced practice nurses, and a growing universe of what we used to call “non-clinical” roles — operations, training, accreditation, research — being filled, increasingly, by nurses who knew the floor before they knew the boardroom. This is what an empowered profession looks like: not a parallel system, but a real ladder, built inside the workplaces where you will spend your career.
Nursing is being recognised, at last, as a clinical profession in its own right. Virginia Henderson’s classic definition — “the nurse is temporarily the consciousness of the unconscious, the love of life of the suicidal, the leg of the amputee, the eyes of the newly blind, a means of locomotion for the infant” — is finally being matched by the scope of practice you will be allowed to exercise. Workplaces are getting safer. Staffing norms, security protocols, and protective policies are slowly catching up with what nurses have quietly asked for over decades. The pace is imperfect. The direction is right. Your work is being valued. Nursing is, for the first time in Indian corporate healthcare, being discussed as a profession worth investing in, not a cost to be minimised. You are entering the profession at the very moment it is being rebuilt around you.
So, to the young nurse holding the lamp.
There will come a night, not far from now, when you are very tired. The shift will have been long. A patient or a relative will have been cruel. You will sit in the changing room, and for one honest moment, you will wonder why you chose this.
In that moment, please remember.
You chose the profession that places a newborn, still wet and warm, onto the chest of the woman who made her. You chose the profession that teaches a young father, hands trembling from joy and fear, how to support his daughter’s neck for the first time. You chose the profession that sits beside the dying when even their families cannot bear to. You chose the profession that, at three in the morning, quietly holds up everything in a hospital that beeps and hums and breathes.
Mother Teresa once said, “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.” You will do small things with great love, yes. But you will also do great things, most of them unrecorded. You will catch a sepsis in a newborn because something in your hands felt warmer than it should have. You will notice a young mother’s silence in week two and gently turn the course of her postpartum life. You will be the reason a baby goes home with her mother instead of without one. None of this will appear on a discharge summary. All of it will live, somewhere, in a family’s prayers, long after they have forgotten your name but never your face.
Remember the mother from the very beginning of this piece. The one wiping her eyes with the corner of her saree as her daughter walks in carrying a small brass lamp. She is, in some sense, every mother in India. She is the mother Annie reassured two thousand times. She is the mother Sunita prayed for through the second wave. And one day, she will be sitting in another auditorium, watching another row of young women in starched white walk in, watching a young nurse who once stood exactly where you are standing tonight lean forward and light the lamp of someone yet to come.
Because here is the small detail most people miss in the lamp ceremony. The graduating nurse never lights her own lamp. A senior nurse lights hers, and from that flame, every junior lamp is lit. Nursing is a profession that does not light itself. Annie lit Sunita. Sunita will light you. And one night, sooner than you think, in some corridor, in some labour room, in some NICU, a frightened girl in starched white will hold up an unlit lamp and look to you. She will be waiting.
When that moment comes, lean forward.
The lamp is still burning. It has burned through wars and through pandemics, through generations of women who were told their work was small. It is in your hands now. Carry it gently. Carry it proudly. Carry it far. And when your hands grow tired, as one day they will, do not let it go out.
Pass it on.