An administrator speaks to committees. Once I stopped being one, I found myself speaking to auditoriums instead — on men who built the town I have spent forty-four years living in, and to teenagers in uniform who had never heard of the women I wanted them to know.

In February 2026, on his birth anniversary at Gitai Mandir, I spoke on Jamnalal Bajaj — a talk that was, in part, about my own life before it began. He had interviewed my father in the 1930s and hired him, and my father rose to become chief manager of the local cotton ginning and pressing mills Bajaj had founded. Without that interview, I would never have been born in Wardha at all. Sevagram itself was his village before it was mine — he brought Gandhi here in 1936, and the land MGIMS stands on was partly his gift. Sushila Nayar came to Sevagram because of Gandhi; Gandhi came to Sevagram because of Jamnalal Bajaj, whom he treated as a fifth son. At the turn of the twentieth century, Bajaj owned nearly half the town — a fact, I discovered, that even people working inside the institutions he founded no longer knew. In the days after, I had calls from people I’d never met, wanting to talk about the research, the delivery, the Hindi — but what stayed with me was how many of them were hearing their own town’s history for the first time from a man’s grandson-by-circumstance, not from anywhere else.

In August, at the college in Pipri that carries his name, I spoke on Shrikrishnadas Jajoo — a topper in matriculation, gold medallist in law from Calcutta, a lawyer whose practice was making him rich within two years of starting it. At thirty-nine, a full year ahead of his own plan, he closed his law practice for good, having decided years earlier that once he’d saved twenty thousand rupees he owed himself nothing further and owed the country the rest of his life. He gave Wardha the next twenty-five years free of charge — the Marwari schools, the Gandhian craft institutions, GS College of Commerce, this same rural service college in Pipri. He was, by every account I could find, absurdly punctual: Wardha’s political circles had names for how differently its leaders arrived at meetings — Malaviya reaching the station after the train had gone, Nehru racing his car to catch the next one, Gandhi arriving exactly one minute early. Jajoo arrived an hour early, every time, fully prepared before anyone else was in the room. He ground his own flour, spun his own cloth, swept his own floors, and when old age came, resigned every post he held, one by one, so a younger generation would have somewhere to stand. I closed that talk the way the moment asked to be closed, on a note about literacy and awakening, and told the students what I’d told the cadets a month earlier in different words: that no one in either story waited for permission before doing something history remembers.

That earlier talk, to NCC cadets in July, was the one I’d thought least about beforehand and enjoyed most in the delivery. I told them about Sudha Murthy, who as the only woman in her engineering class saw a job advertisement from Telco that read “lady candidates need not apply,” and instead of accepting it, wrote directly to J.R.D. Tata on a postcard, asking why not — and got the interview, and the job, and became the company’s first woman engineer. I told them about Kiran Bedi, who as a young IP officer had a car towed for illegal parking during the 1982 Asian Games and only afterward learned it belonged to the Prime Minister’s own office — earning her the nickname “Crane Bedi” in the next morning’s papers, and a reputation for treating the law as no respecter of rank that followed her into Tihar Jail, where she started schools and libraries for prisoners other people had already given up on. Kalpana Chawla, Ila Bhatt, Smriti Mandhana filled out the rest of the hour — a girl from Karnal who watched the stars from her roof and became an astronaut; a woman who renamed “unorganised labourers” as “self-employed women” and built a movement on the difference; a batter who practised the same shot for years before anyone was watching her play it. Different fields, different decades, and not one of them waited for someone else’s permission to be extraordinary — which was the only lesson I actually wanted thirteen-year-olds in uniform to walk away with.

Three talks, three audiences, and the same discovery running under all of them: Wardha’s own history, and the shape of an ordinary life lived with resolve, turn out to be things people are hungry to hear about, once someone finally stands up and tells them.