2nd ARTICLE IN THE TIMES OF INDIA!

So 2015 gave me a second chance to wield my pen again and be featured in the Onam special cover of The Times of India on 17th August 2015. Thanks to the opportunity meted out by Sherene Joseph at the TOI whose offer I took up eagerly!

Now if you can manage to read the fine print from the image my article that I've posted in this blog, you can figure out that I've heavily referenced from the personal anecdotes my paternal grandfather penned down exclusively for me under the nostalgia section.

In fact, this was I think the last of his writings that ever saw a press. For within a fortnight after I had submitted my entry, my grandfather fell sick with a brief spell of illness that saw him being hospitalized for the first time in his astonishingly healthy and rigorous 86 years.

I remember the doused enthusiasm and blunted happiness with which I received the news that my article was going to be featured and the dull sense of joy when I saw it in print. For the hospitalization of my grandfather which was progressively turning worse as he began to be in intensive care, quite sapped the positive feeling out of Life for a week.

Being a doctor, it was painfully evident that my grandfather was approaching the termination of his commendable journey and so in a flash of inspiration which was undoubtedly from Heaven, I took a clipping of my article and highlighted the paragraph where I paraphrased his contribution to the article. He took it in his hands and smiled a weak smile that reached right up to his eyes that sparkled with pride and joy and at that moment, amidst the chilly cold and beeping machines in the ICU, I knew he was silently blessing me; comforting me and earnestly beseeching me to find closure.

We discharged him at his behest and our request (and obviously against medical advice!) and brought him home the next day. He spent a day in apparent recovery, good health and cheer and at the crack of dawn the very next day, passed along to the void as silently and as painlessly one can ever hope for!

So yes, this article is immensely important to me in more than materialistic ways and has forever the mark of poignant sentimentality attached to it as the last words my writer-grandfather penned for his novice granddaughter.