Personifying Grit

Stricken by polio as a child,advocate Shyamrao Patole did not allow physical challenges to come between his education and career

On a muggy July afternoon at the district court in Shivaji Nagar,when everyone else seems to be shedding their coats and jackets,Shyamrao Patole wears his black advocates coat with particular care and pride. Every now and then,he shakes out dust and creases,and pulls the lapels close together. As he speaks to a client in the grassy central courtyard and reaches out to take her heavy file,he fixes his crutches under his arms to keep them from slipping.

When Patole was a year-and-a-half old,his parents took him to their family doctor for a polio vaccination shot. The doctor used an expired vaccine and Patole fell ill rapidly. The illness had already spread to most of my body,up to the throat. It was so bad,most doctors we met refused to treat me, Patole recalls. Without medical assistance,his physical challenges made life in the remote village of Medankar wadi in Khed quite difficult. The only way he could move was by crawling on the ground,the signs of which are evident in the callous formations on his yellow and hard palms. I would look up at my friends from the ground,and my first ambition was to stand and talk to my friends face to face,looking them in the eye, he says.

Attending school was out of the question and it was among the things that hurt Patole the most. Before I joined school,my mother would give me a lot of books to read and I would go through them on my own, he says. But during one visit to Pune,doctors finally agreed to operate on him and fitted him with calipers and gave him crutches. For the first time I stood up on my own legs, he says.

After his operation,Patole joined his friends in the sixth grade at the local school and then there was no stopping him. Even though he had missed out on five years of schooling,he found that he was at par with his classmates. In fact,I was one of the best students, he says.

Patole went on to acquire several qualifications over the years MA in Sociology,LLB,MBA,diploma courses in labour law,taxation law and cyber law. And even today,at 41,he continues to work on a PhD in Strategic Management. Education is the best thing that happened to me. I will never stop learning and studying. It has made me everything I am, he says.

With his many degrees in law and management,Patole is an advocate both at the district court in Pune,and at the High Court in Mumbai,and also runs a management consultancy service for several corporations.

His life is now very different from his days in Khed,but he looks back at his earlier hardship as an advantage. Unfortunately,many people who get through to the IITs and IIMs are usually rich,and are not in touch with ground realities. But I am,and when companies come to me for consultations,I can tell them what people need and how they think, he says.

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Patoles philosophy of making the best of things and finding a silver lining in every situation can be spotted in the simplest of things. Like the way he gets his left shoe customised with a larger heel to adjust for the shorter left leg or the way he convinced the district judge to install ramps at every building for the physically challenged. I dont live in the past and think what could have been. I want to make the best of what I have now, he says.

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