(L-R) V J Singh (son), Simran (daughter-in-law), Inder Singh, Deepi Singh, Mollie (daughter), Glenn (son-in-law), Tara Jyote and Sasha Jyote (granddaughters)

A team examined the feeble girl at length, and finally advised her father on the course of action to alleviate her problems. Her parents determinedly started carrying out all the exercises and medications prescribed by the doctors. They 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 young Deepi Singh took her first baby steps in life at the ripe old age of 5!

It is with a great deal of fondness that she recalls the moment. “I remember that day very clearly, because prior to that I used to fall easily because my legs were extremely weak.” A crisis had been turned on its head, and instead an opportunity had been created. There were to be some hiccups here and there, but Deepi Singh handled those very well. For instance when she was 33 years old, she was informed by the Head of the Orthopedics Department at the UCLA that she would probably never walk again beyond the age of 40. She must be inordinately strong-willed, for even at 82 she’s walking just fine, of course, these days with the help of a walking stick.

In fact between the ages of 5 and 82, Deepi Singh has done quite a few remarkable things in life. Her will power, coupled with her educational background, helped her surge ahead in her working life. She rose to become the Director of Foods and Nutrition at Kaiser Permanente, an integrated managed care consortium based out of Oakland in California. A measure of the size of the company she worked for where she became a name to reckon with can be gauged from this figure—in 2014, the non-profit Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals reported a combined net income of USD 3.1 billion. And then she gave it all up to return to her favorite profession—teaching!