“As the oldest child in both my maternal and paternal families, the pressure to do well in life was exceedingly high. All my family members had been highly educated, from University gold medalists and Freedom fighters to army doctors. So when I decided to pursue BSc Geology, I was pretty much left to myself. My father even suggested I take a break and apply to medical colleges a year later, since Geology was ‘not the way to go’. But I stood my ground. Right from college applications and admissions until graduation, I pushed myself and worked hard for this degree. However, eventually I fell prey to the demands of the society and pursued both managerial and legal studies, to check the boxes on the list of future achievements I had prepared early on in life. But life does not always go how you’d like it to.
Through the tough times of life, like the prolonged battle of my first spouse with cancer or the legal battle around adopting two children of the same gender, I only learnt that every problem must be tackled to the best of our ability, till a solution is found. I believe it is most important to be able to make decisions and facilitate them, rather than follow paths set by others, with little or no understanding. I have tried to imbibe this in both my daughters as well. To support them in their social work journeys and let them choose for themselves, educate themselves and sometimes even teach us, puts them on the path of independence and self realization. Hence I made the choice for myself as well.
After working my way through many companies both locally and globally, I finally became a part of the TED×Hyderabad organization, where, with targeted, selective speakers and audiences, we succeeded in building a community that thinks, enables and participates, with support and inspiration from one another. Afterall, life doesn’t stop until it ends and everything until then is a battle waiting to be won.”

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