She is a woman extraordinaire.
She lost her vision and her husband when in her forties, but Mother Nature bestowed
her with an astounding sense of hearing that could send an owl ducking for
cover and a remarkable memory that could give a hard disk a run for its money!
The telephone is her best friend and helps her stay connected with the world
and her kith and kin. She cannot read the phone numbers from the phonebook but
her mind is her miniature directory that has devised ingenious methods of
memorizing them. Her culinary skills are legendary. Her incredible sense of
touch and smell eclipse her visual impairment and enable her to dish out lip
smacking delicacies! Her penchant for Carnatic music is such that she can
identify atleast 40 raagas within seconds of their rendition! When her near and
dear ones celebrate an event or reach a milestone, she rewards them with an
invaluable gift - a poem in Hindi or Tamil that has invariably moved many a
recipient to tears!
Cricket is her religion and
Sachin Tendulkar, her God. When friends or relatives are eager for the cricket
score, they dial her for an update as they are certain she would be glued to
her transistor radio, her window to the world. Recently two cricket enthusiasts
argued on whether Anil Kumble played in the 1992 Cricket World Cup or not. They
checked with her and she told them that he was part of the 1996 team and reeled
off the names of the 14 member squad, including Salil Ankola who played just
one group match against Sri Lanka. When India plays in the West Indies, she
stays awake at night listening to the radio commentary and when they play in
Australia, she wakes up at 4 am. She never fails to listen to the Sports news
on All India Radio at 8pm everyday and keeps her family informed of the team
selections for the forthcoming tours.
Her grand-daughter is the apple of
her eye and her education started in the confines of her grandma's tiny bedroom.
Grandma is a polyglot, but most proficient in Hindi and believed it was
sacrilege if her grand - daughter did not ace the subject in her class. The
little girl of course, had other ideas as she intensely disliked her Hindi
teacher in school for some inexplicable reason and hence protested and resisted
learning the language, with a vengeance. Grandma was unrelenting in the pursuit
of her goal and wrote about 60 essays and 400 antonyms, synonyms, proverbs and
phrases for her school final exams in a script that resembled hieroglyphics (
as she could not see what she wrote ). Her dream of the young girl topping the
class in Hindi came a cropper as she was nowhere near the top!
She is a woman of substance, she
is a savvy woman and she has successfully battled cancer! She is deeply spiritual and follows a strict regimen of meditation. Her strength
originates, not from the brunt of all the adversities she battled in her life,
but by the extent of her refusal to allow these adversities to dictate to her. She
is frail, all of 4 feet 11 inches tall and weighs about 40 kgs. She is my mom
and she just turned eighty!
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