Aravind's Personal Blog

Few weeks ago I was in the emergency room in the local hospital for a minor ailment. While waiting to be hauled for a CT scan, I overheard a nearby patient give his year of birth to the nurse. It was 1935, the same year my mother was born. For a few moments I was glad and then sad; glad, because someone purportedly of my mother's age is still living, sad because my mother is not. Of course, it is a known fact that the average life expectancy in India is about a decade lower than that in the US (69.7 versus 78.9 years, to be exact ). My mother died on Feb 26, 2013, in the ICU of a hospital in our hometown in India, two-and-half hours after I reached her bedside. About fifty hours earlier, she called me as she was getting ready to be transported to the hospital by ambulance. All she could say was that she was having shortness of breath and waiting to be rushed to the hospital. I did not realize at that time that it was meant to be our last conversation. In the summer of 2010, Atul G...

( dedicated to the numerous nieces and grandnieces on the International Women's day, 2021 ) My parents loved girls. They didn’t have daughters of their own but they treated and considered a whole bunch of girls their own. Since my mother’s seventh death anniversary last month, I was thinking what my parents' best trait was - They loved kids in general but girls were very special to them. They were married 70 years ago and spent most of their married life as migrants in a distant place away from their relatives. Although very closely acquainted with the numerous nieces, my parents missed the day-to-day interactions with them. My parents made several friends, many of them families with girls, and considered those girls their own. My parents believed that girls bring a great amount of sanity and good fortune to the household. As much as they loved their sons, my parents felt that angels do not tread around the house without daughters. This was a special trait in the highly patriar...