All festivals be it Eid, Diwali and Holi were celebrated in the college campus by all the professors and their families. I was brought up in those times.

As I grew up, my mother knitted beautiful sweaters and I would get stopped by women on the road to check the cables she had drawn because they were so complicated, so beautiful and so British.

She would read books and knit through the winters so that I could wear them. I was demanding. As far as shapes and colours were concerned, I always wanted something different. When it came to designs, there was a horseman, people playing golf and she would knit them all for me.

I troubled her a lot. I would ask her to go to the Raj Bagh silk factory to buy raw silk and get it dyed in my favourite colours. I didn’t want simple blue, green colours. I wanted beautiful shades such as peach. She brought colours into my life and gave me whatever I asked for. That’s why I loved colours. She would then go to the ‘rangars (dyers)’ in Maharaja Bazaar and get the stuff dyed. That’s how these colours came into my life. I wore some of the most beautiful silk shirts worn by the young people those days.

The other thing that this graceful woman, my mother, inculcated in us was our love for debating. She wrote my first paper herself and then I did the same for my siblings. Because of her efforts, I became a very keen debater and won many prizes.

It continued through the medical college and in my future endeavours. Perhaps, that is why I agreed to represent my political parties – be it the PDP (Peoples Democratic Party) or National Conference as their national spokesperson.

Maybe those were the remnants of what I did earlier. And that also helped me a lot in my career as a doctor. It was a matter of lecturing people and interacting with patients, expressing whatever little I knew. It surely impacted my communication skills. So, communication and writing skills came from my mother.

To be continued.....