What my 92 year old Grandmother Taught me about Being a Woman in the Workplace Today

With Mother’s Day around the corner — and nearly 4 years now since we lost my grandmother, I decided to take this post out of hiding on my old blog, and bring it onto Medium.

Originally published in September 2015, this is a piece I come back to again and again to reminisce and stay inspired.

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I spent the past week in India. I was there for work, but coincidentally my trip coincided with the timing of my paternal grandmother’s first year death anniversary. Traveling from Mumbai to Chennai to Kancheepuram to Hyderabad in just four days was intense, but the time on the road in my grandmother’s native country gave me a lot of time to reflect on her and her life.

My grandmother was known to be a difficult woman, and it’s no secret that some people may have found her to be downright unbearable. However, I’ve always had a certain fascination with my grandmother. Perhaps it’s hard to comprehend what a woman living and juggling work and life in the twenty first century could find fascinating, and even didactic, about a woman who grew up in a country half a world away, before the onset of the information age, and with only an eight grade education. But my grandmother was one of the most…