"Hi daddy", I said, wassup?

"Where are you darling?"

​​"Still in the office dad. Came in at 7 this morning and still got stuff to wrap up."

I heard a split second hesitation, and then the words, which ring in my ears even today, 22 years later...

​Dad was a Tata man through and through. Worked with the company for over 30 years and legend has it that all TAS (Tata Administrative Service) personnel were sent to him as part of their final internship - if you survived Jal Master, you were ready for the battles ahead. So went the folklore. I know that IIM-B students looked forward to his guest lecture visits there - he brought insights straight from the markets to the classroom.

​There was an element of truth in what he had said, I had to grudgingly admit. But I found it difficult to break away from the cycle I had created for myself. It had been 5 years and I hadn't taken a day off - except when I had the measles.

Ten years after that phone call, things hadn't changed much. Except now, I was the boss. And I made sure of one thing - I expected people to come in on time and I expected them to finish their work and leave at a decent hour. Everyone except myself.

​I thought I needed to be on call seven days a week and because a large part of my media career was managing news channels, I was, for the most part, on call 24 hours a day. 

Don't be afraid to take those 21 days of holidays that is your due. No one is that important. The skies will still hold and you'll be surprised how little has changed when you return. Same shit, different day - as the media adage goes.

Focus on building a good team around you - one that is able to function without you around. While heading STAR TV Ops, I was once told by a colleague: "You're making a mistake teaching your assistants everything you know. They'll just replace you someday, and at a lesser salary." If you're afraid that your organization will replace your decades of experience with a tyro just learning the tricks, you need to quit in any case.

​My 3-year-old little girl slipped smack down on the shiny marble floors wailing, while I waited on the side lines for Act 2. As a standard routine, she'd lift her nose off the floor, look up, realize mommy and daddy weren't going to come to her aid, pick herself up and start scampering again. But this time, the script took a slight detour. New actors stepped in. Helpful strangers who didn't know better, tried to help her up. On cue, I roared from the sidelines, "Leave her alone! She'll get up on her own. Thank you!"

​It's not easy bringing up a little girl these days - in the times we live in, even the tiniest of them are not spared. My husband and I decided to bring up a little warrior. So, little tiny scratches are to be dismissed and the bigger wounds are medals to be worn proudly; a fight in the garden with her best buddy has to be sorted out between the two gladiators; a nip by the family pooch usually means you've either been teasing her or not reading the signals she's giving out.

For the longest time, the only toys she had were hand-me-down Legos or stuffed toys, they were her best playmates - Georgie the giraffe, Leo the lion, and Ballu the black bear. Until Barbie came along. That twitty, airhead Barbie with blonde hair, a tiny nonexistent waistline, and no personality to speak of. And it was hard. We'd avoid the Disney section of Hamley's just in case we bumped into Barbie, but she was there to stay. My little warrior wanted a Barbie doll for her fourth birthday. We refused. She protested. We stood firm. A kindly 'aunty' came laden with gifts on B-day, and what do you know, there was Barbie in all her pink shining glory! I shuddered and looked at my friend accusingly. "I knew you'd never buy it for her, so I got one" said the traitor. "Every little girl must have a Barbie." This was, I realized, going to be one long fight.

​​We're a family that lives, eats, and breathes adventure. It's our work and our passion and when the little warrior was turning five, we decided it was time for her first trek in the mountains. She was a month short of five years and my mom thought we were crazy. "How can you expect a kid to walk long hours! Take a doctor's advice; it's not good for their bones; are you sure she's ready?" "Well", I said, "we'll soon find out won't we?" We chose a trekking circuit in Kashmir that was just a four-day trek and less than two hours away from Srinagar and emergency medical attention if required. We really shouldn't have worried. The little warrior charged up the mountain side and across the meadows like a mountain goat and while the 10 KM uphill hike on the second day left all the adults breathless, she reached before everyone else, slipped into her shorts, jumped into the icy cold fresh water stream flowing past our campsite and decided she was going to spend the rest of the evening with the ponies who'd come to cool off there. The husband beamed with pride. I just sighed with relief. The fear that we may have to carry a 15 kg package on our backs up the mountains was totally unfounded.

​I came home the other day to find the whole drawing room overturned. The cushions were missing, as were the chairs. Curious, I entered the bedroom to find all the missing furniture pieces lined up in a row and the pillows and cushions all neatly lined up on top. Saira was in the tunnel below with the glazen-eyed Barbie alongside her. "What are you doing" I asked. "Making a spaceship" was the prompt reply. "Really?" I asked, "and who's the pilot?" My little warrior looked up at me like most little ones do, with that gosh-what-a-dumb-question roll of the eyeballs and corrected me, "Astronaut. Me!" "And Barbie?" I asked, "what is she doing in your spaceship?" "Nothing. She does nothing. She just sits there. So I'm going to leave her on Mars and come back." I may have lost the Barbie battle, but I certainly won the Barbie war!

​Her best buddy Z has got a new addition to the family - the cutest, fluffiest kitten ever. Of course, my warrior princess wants one too. So there’s a bet on between her and the dad. If she gets better than him in skiing and roller-blading, she can get a kitten home. Even before the “deal” could be cemented with a handshake, she donned her roller blades and helmet and turned around to look at the beleaguered father: “Come on then, teach me!”

​She’s been skiing since she was three-and-a-half, taking the family tradition a generation further. She’s good but nowhere close to being as good as the dad, but that doesn’t stop her from dreaming about that kitten cuddling up to her at night. “You did say that if you threw a message out into the universe, the universe would give you what you want, right mama?” Umm…yes, I did, in a totally different context of course, but I did. And I’m guessing it will not be long before we have another 4-legged fur child gamboling around the house.

She's a girly girl all the way. She wants long hair "all the way up to my knees" and throws a fit even if you so much as mention a trim. Elsa was her favorite Disney character until she was five and now it is DC Comic’s Wonder Woman. The pink flowery frocks have given way to shorts and jumpsuits. She still wants "pretend makeup" (whatever that is) for her 8th birthday, but the little warrior in her rises to the fore at the best (and worst) of times. The churlish little boy who tries to push his way down the slide is roundly told off to "stand in line and wait." The little kid with the tube wrapped around her waist at the pool gets unwanted advice: "how will you learn to swim with that? Do fishes use tubes?" Until recently she was the only little girl in her Kung fu class and is always made to spar with boys two inches taller and three years older. Often, she beats them off the mat and thinks that's perfectly natural. No conflict in her head at all.

​How do you teach your little girl not to turn the other cheek anymore and yet not encourage violence? How do I get her not to trust strangers and yet be friendly with everyone she meets? How do we teach her to stand up for herself, not take everything and everyone at face value and yet "respect your elders?" For any parent, it's a complex world now. What we learnt from our parents no longer holds good - what we impart to our daughters is often in conflict with how we were raised. But our little girls seem totally comfortable with the dichotomy of it all. They're fine being both - a warrior and a lady. Perhaps that's our cue. Perhaps it's time for us to unlearn what we were taught when we were little girls and turn to them for guidance on how to bring them up! 

​...until I saw the kids scamper up and down with ease. I stood on top and looked down at this "ski slope for beginners", my heart skipping a beat. "Come on!" yelled Akshay - my husband and instructor. He was standing at the bottom madly waiving his arms urging me to come down. I could barely hear him, the wind and the chatter of the kids (or was that my teeth?)  making it hard to hear what was, I hoped, his words of encouragement.

​I stood on top, literally frozen in the snow. There was no freakin' way I was reaching down there in a single piece. While I stood there imagining broken limbs and an injured ego, a little three feet nothing runt whizzed past me yelling "Cluck! Cluck! Cluck! Mama is a chicken!" She waved her elbows up a down imitating a mother hen and reached the end of the slope before I could get a word in. My loving daughter. She began skiing at three-and-half and was already two years ahead of my non-existent experience. 

I had little choice. It was now or never. Like a puttering motorbike that's got dirt in its carburetor,  I stumbled my way down, until the slope decided to do its job and slid me down at a pace I didn't appreciate. I landed in an ungainly heap at the bottom, the pride more hurt than any part of my body. "Brilliant !" beamed the husband, "now let's get you on the ski lift."

​The ski lift was my nemesis. It's basically a  constantly moving bar that you need to hold on to while it takes you gliding up the slope. Only with me, I never glided up anywhere. I fell within the first three seconds. I had been falling for the last five years. I would fall 50 - 60 times in a day, the left side of my body bruised blue, but I still never managed to master the bar lift. 

"No!" I shuddered, "can't do that." "Can't mama?" squeaked the runt, "you said there's no word like can't." She was right. There wasn't. And so I picked myself up, stood in the lift line for the thousandth time, ready to take another beating. "Just make sure your shins touch your ski boots  at all times and don't sit on the bar!" Last minute instructions I had heard 999 times. I grabbed the bar, mumbling under my breath "shins to boots...shins to boots...shins to boots. Sai help me do this." 
​
​I guess He heard me. I didn't fall. I was up on top of the slope within 30 seconds. It was a miracle!

And that's how I learnt to ski. I was 50 and my daughter was 5. Today, I ski down Phase 1 of the Kongdori station at Gulmarg and manage the Blue and Red runs in the Italian Dolomites. 

And my adventures again taught me some lessons. It's never too late to do something for the first time. It's never too late to learn a new skill. And it's definitely never too late to achieve the impossible!

​I did this trek back in May 2014, almost exactly two years after surviving cancer and going through three major surgeries - the last one, just eight weeks before my trek was to start. So what you read here, is me at my unfit worst. Three years later, I did this trek again - in fact it's tougher cousin EBC-Gokyo Lakes, in May 2017. And my experience was quite different. Firstly, it wasn't as physically hard as I expected, and secondly, since I was the trekking leader, it was I pushing, urging, egging people along! The tables had turned - in just three years!