Happy Women's Day!!

March 8^th, 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.