My Father, My Strength
[My father, who died in 1998, would have been 93 years this month. This piece written five years after his death is being republished here.] Twenty-three years ago, soon after I landed in New York to continue my research career, I visited the resident audiologist in the hospital affiliated to the college I had just started to work in. I was looking for a better hearing aid that would improve my hearing. The revelation of the baffled audiologist still rings in my ears - if I grew up in the US as a boy, with the degree of hearing loss that I had suffered, I would have been put in a special school for the hearing impaired (sign language school). I explained to the audiologist, and to other hearing professionals who examined me since, as well as to some inquisitive parents of hearing-impaired children, that I had achieved my level of communication due to the efforts of one person – my father . Back in India in the early sixties, an antibiotic overdose reduced my hearing to marginal