The Karma Yogi

The emergency came, like emergencies do, without warning.

One moment my mother was finishing her column for this newspaper. The next, she was feeling deeply unwell. She reached out to her family doctor.

When he came, he feared she was having a heart attack—like many other elderly people during the Covid pandemic. He rushed her to the hospital. She was taken to the ICU. Tests were performed, and more tests followed (as tests do). Soon, the doctors were hypothesizing about what was wrong and what they should do.

My mother, meanwhile, was wracked by growing anxiety. It wasn’t her heart she was worried about. She remembered she hadn’t yet hit “send” on that column for the newspaper. The deadline was looming.

She politely explained to the doctors that she needed to leave. When they inquired why she wanted to go home, she explained she had a column to submit. The bewildered physicians told her that she needed to focus on saving her life. She assured them she was happy to do that—after she met the deadline.

My mother, Vatsala Vedantam, was what they call a natural. Journalism wasn’t what she started out doing, nor what she was trained to do. She spent years as a teacher, administrator, and college principal. But writing was always her passion, and when the opportunity for a career change opened up at this paper in the 1980s, she seized it.

For years, readers of this paper enjoyed her columns and “perspectives on education” and other topics. She became something of a celebrity, with people coming up to tell her how much they enjoyed her work. She had a guilty look when she received such compliments – the truth was she wasn’t writing for anyone else; she was writing because writing felt like breathing. 

My mother died this past weekend. She learned early what many of us discover too late: The reason to follow your passions is not because they always work out. It’s because when you follow your passions, all your anxieties and ailments — the “organ recitals” that consume
so many conversations among adults of a certain age — fade away. The thing you are doing becomes more important than you.

At the age of 92, my mother wrote a biography of her own mother. Days before she died, even as she was gasping for air following a lung infection, she was outlining the chapters of an autobiography.

In 2024, my mother compiled 55 of her profiles of India’s foremost artists and writers into a book, The Achievers.

By my count, she missed one.