Ajji's stories
My earliest memories of ‘learning’ are the stories that my grandmother would tell me. Her stories taught me so many things- they helped me learn that kindness is paramount, that compassion makes us human, that hard work leads to success, and that we must not judge people based on appearances. Most of my value system, as a child, was built on these stories. My maternal grandmother, or ‘Ajji’ as I would lovingly call her, was a very simple, but a well-read woman with an air of calm and wisdom about her. She had received very little formal education but her books were her treasure. Most of her stories would revolve around mythology. She would tell us stories of kings and queens, some evil, some kind. She would tell us stories of the Gods, from the Sanskrit texts that she would read in the temple. And some stories that she had heard from her parents and grandparents. These were the stories that I found the most interesting- they had been handed down from one generation to another an