March 8th, a special occasion to celebrate the womanhood.
To show our gratitude, we usually take social media to wish our acquaintances with
Women’s day quotes or forward them memes or share articles about celebrities
who excelled in their departments. We often fail to recognize ladies around us,
their values and importance in our lives.
So instead of doing the routines, I decide to pen down about
a super woman who is donning many hats now and plays all her roles to
perfection. She is none other than, a hardworking research scholar in field of
Chemistry, a wonderful mom to a super active mischievous kid, a god fearing
religious daughter, a great home maker, personal nutritionist & chemist and
my better half Ms. ShanmugaPriya Vimalan.
She likes to call her by her full name and I never do that in real world.
We both are two contrasting characters. She is organised and
I am messy. She is slow but steady and I am fast paced & incomplete. She is
religious and I am non believer of god. She
recites Thirumurai padhigam and I sleep hearing those verses. She is vegetarian
and I breathe chicken. She is doing research in chemistry and I know only
pipette & burette and at times confused which is what. She hates social
media and I die without those. She doesn’t like Illayaraja and I adore him. She
resists uploading pictures online and I love clicking & sharing pictures
with all. Yet, she accepted and embraced me fully as I am. There were few
heated arguments happened on our differences but never been bitter or
resentful.
The toughest role to do in one’s life is pursuing Ph.D. in
science and craziest would be pursuing Ph.D. with a toddler. We all know about
the mood swings that could happen to a woman. Be it during puberty, premenstrual
or pregnancy. In her case, I witnessed terrific mood swing happens when she
prepares for DC (Doctoral Committee), while publishing paper and preparing for
thesis. To people who don’t understand severity of doing research, one need to
devote their life to a very narrow subject for at least three years with
minimal help from guide or external. I was so naïve at beginning and compared
it with my final semester project work which I bought from T. Nagar shop. She
keeps murmur words like origin, graph, peaks, nano compound, elasticity,
tensile strength, characterisation, adsorption in her sleep. At times she reads
other’s articles for weeks just to conclude that it is irrelevant for her
research. Such is the time consuming and daunting task.
Despite going through
such trauma in completing her research, she is doing commendable job in taking
care of Aarav (our little naughty son). Babysitting Aarav itself is like doing
Ph.D. Doing both in parallel is something which I couldn’t even think of.
Having said this, there is another role which is even tougher than doing
research. It is being life partner to a research scholar. I have to underplay
many times to avoid the effect of catastrophic mood swings. Jokes apart, I
often feel guilty that I couldn’t assist her much in her research. The only
time I helped her was fixing the laptop hang issue just by killing the task and
in turn she innocently thanked me by saying, ‘Idhukku dan software engineer, purusan
ah irukanum nu’ (Grateful to have software engineer as husband). The only soul,
who recognize me as engineer.
I never had seen such strong and multitasking lady in my
life. On this special day, I wish you all success and i feel lucky to have you
as my better half. Adding to this, I wish all women in my life, a very happy
Women’s day. Keep rocking and keep inspiring us.
