Mrs Singh with the Kaiser family

Which brings us to the point that the Chinese word for crisis has two distinct characters signifying danger and opportunity, in fact the proverb says that “crisis is opportunity riding a dangerous wind.” Mrs Singh walks that proverb every day, having turned an enormous crisis in her infancy—she was nine months old when severely afflicted with polio—into an opportunity to learn and discover things about her own self that she otherwise may not have explored. She also managed to excel in her profession in ways few others can, working to rise to the top everywhere, and making an instant impact. And to imagine that she started walking for the very first time only at age 5, and even then the real and constant danger of leading a crippled life shadowed her at every step. But Mrs Singh, powered by the force of her indomitable will, and the care of her parents, never gave up dreaming. Eleanor Roosevelt once famously said that “the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” Indeed Deepi Singh’s future was shaped by her own beautiful ones.

INITIAL YEARS, PARENTAL SUPPORT

Mrs Singh’s story is paved in inspiration, but the initial steps in her life were taken on the cobbled streets of pain and rejection. When she could not run and walk like other kids in her school at Lyallpur in undivided Punjab (today Faisalabad, Pakistan), she felt rejected. But quickly, she resolved to turn that rejection into her strength, an ally that has stood by her all her life. The early years were indeed very hard. She had no sensation in her legs. She is grateful eternally to her parents who did their best to make their daughter gain confidence, and never feel pitied. Like Robert Heinlein says, they didn’t handicap her further by making her life very easy, she was made to feel like any other normal person. Her paternal grandfather, a well-to-do physician, was very fond of her, and wanted her to get the very best treatment. Her own father, a postgraduate in Chemistry who Mrs Singh fondly remembers at every step in her life, left no stone unturned to deal with her difficulties. All efforts were made to ease her pain on those pathways pebbled with physical discomfiture.

Once French doctors came visiting Lyallpur, but the British would have no Indian subjects visit their arch rivals. In a stroke of ingenuity, Mrs Singh’s father wrapped his young daughter in a blanket and smuggled her into a French doctor’s cabin. A team examined the feeble and young Deepi Singh at length, and finally advised her father on the course of action to alleviate her problems. Mrs Singh’s parents determinedly started carrying out all the exercises and medications as prescribed by the doctors, and even went a step further—her father regularly corresponded with the French doctors who kept dispatching to him the latest research, remedies, and rehabilitation studies on polio. It all began to work out well, and the young Deepi Singh took her first baby steps at the ripe old age of 5!