Authorpreneur Dashboard – Damayanti Chandrasekhar
Thank You Dadima
Biographies & Memoirs
Glimpses from the life of my grandmother, my hero, and how she navigated life as a widow and spunky businesswoman in a man's world.
Rough-Cut Book Bubbles from Thank You Dadima
Scary encounters
I feel like we live such cloistered lives in our urban cocoons. Back in the day when woods, deserted fields, and dark places were plentiful, ghost sightings were more commonplace. These days we are so removed from such experiences that we question their very existence. I for one believe in angels, spirits, and other supernatural stuff. Dadi was such an animated storyteller and she would make the scene come to life in front of my eyes. She never read any fairy tales to me but these ghost stories she loved to recall and I never tired of hearing them. I just wish I had written down the details, for they tend to fade as the years go by.
Writing about my grandpa
I had to patch together pieces of his life from stories I'd heard from my grandmother and others. I always find it hard writing about people who have passed, especially the ones you have never met. You only know them through the distorted memories of others. And that in itself is subjective. But after speaking to several people it was clear that my grandpa (Abba is how I referred to him), was an extraordinary person. The kind you meet once in a lifetime and who remains unforgettable. He was brilliant; one of the first gas engineers in the country. He was successful; deputy general manager at the Indian Oil Corporation. An incredible human being; compassionate and generous with the innocence of a child. One chapter doesn't do justice to the mammoth of a man that he was.
Girl Power
This is the essence of who my grandma was; well dressed, independent, and a feminist at heart. She loved animals and always owned dogs. It was always a full house with me, the dogs, the live-in maids, and house guests that found it hard to leave because she was such a wonderful hostess. You have to remember that this was India and widows and women in general don't have it easy in the deep rooted patriarchy that is the norm there. But she was unapologetically herself and was brilliantly successful without any man in her life.
