Rocking Grandpas

The former doctor of sports medicine turned 64 on September 19 and is preparing for a 21-day trek to the base camp of Mt Everest. That’s a climb of 18,640 feet. He has already been there once before — in 2003, soon after recovering from a quadruple heart by-pass surgery.

Dr Malur, who shuttles between his home in the United States (where he lives with his wife, daughter, son and grandchildren) and his siblings’ home in Bangalore, is among the few people with heart diseases to reach the camp.

This year, he was scheduled to make a second trip but a new heart complication in January meant he had to postpone his plans to 2008. That only meant more time to get ready for his trek. The regimen is strict: cold water showers, one meal a day, and sleeping on the floor. “I am not the norm. I would not recommend what I do to others. Everyone has got their own mountains to climb — though it could be mental, physical or spiritual,” he says philosophically. “Many people get burdened by age. Life actually begins after 55 — you don’t have to work hard, you have time but you have to conquer your fears,” he says.

After his first Everest adventure, Dr Malur published a book Bypass to Bypasses documenting his journey of hope and inspiration. He also holds motivational sessions for senior citizens and school students while in India.

Johnson T A, BANGALORE

Col Arvind Vasant Joglekar, calling the shots

As a colonel in the army, A.V. Joglekar never shied away from challenges. So when his 16-year-old granddaughter dared him to be a model, he couldn’t appear weak-kneed.

“Soon after my retirement, we were watching TV and Anuradha casually mentioned how difficult it was to act. ‘No, it isn’t’, I said without a thought. She dared me to get there and I accepted the challenge,” the 66-year-old recounts.

But doing the dare wasn’t easy. After fretting over it for two months, Joglekar joined an acting course. At the end of a six-week acting course from the Media School in Deccan and a four-week course in dubbing and voiceover, Joglekar was ready to take on the glamour world — armed with a dashing portfolio from Bunty Prashant’s studio.

Joglekar’s first offer came in no time. Cosmos Bank and United Western Bank shot their ads with him. Since then, Joglekar has done some 60 ads including print, hoardings and television. Besides, he will soon be seen in character roles in the yet-to-be-released films Breaking News and Palak.

His first day as model was tough, though. “It was a scene where I had to give the thumbs up to the girl who played my daughter. Believe me, I just couldn’t do that,” he says. Several retakes later, the ad went on air on all Marathi channels and Joglekar won his bet. Anuradha didn’t mind losing.

Shveta Vashist Gaur, PUNE

Teg Bahadur Singh Teg, scripting success

Teg Bahadur Singh Teg keeps his teacup to his right but fumbles about looking for it on his left. He is 80 and is usually forgiven these bouts of memory lapses but when he declared he would appear for his MA exams, everyone thought he had lost it completely.

But in July this year, when the results came out, Teg Bahadur defied both age and sceptics: he had passed his MA English with 43 per cent.

“Even my wife would sometimes say that I was wasting my time,” says Teg Bahadur, a businessman who deals in machine tools.

After he decided to appear for the exams, Teg Bahadur went looking for a tutor. But none of those he approached agreed to coach him — they didn’t want to waste their time and effort on an 80-year-old. Till he met 87-year-old Prof Madan Lal Sharma.

“People would taunt us saying we were whiling away our time on the pretext of studying. But Teg Bahadur would diligently spend four to five hours every day studying in his office. Now that he has passed the exams, it should silence his critics,” says Prof Sharma.

Teg Bahadur has authored eight books, seven in Punjabi and one in English. He now wants to do his PhD. “I would also like to do an MA (Gurmat) before I embark on that mission,” he says.

Sameer Kumar Sharma, LUDHIANA

Arjun Dev Tejpal, programming a career

When 70 year-old Arjun Dev Tejpal received a mail from Microsoft on April 1 this year informing him that he was one of the 100 recipients of Microsoft’s Most Valued Professionals award, he hit the delete button. ‘Spam,’ he told himself.

“I thought it was a joke. I am no professional — I only offer database solutions on the Net as a hobby. Why would Microsoft be interested in a retired man living in Faridabad?” he says. But it was only when Microsoft followed the ‘spam mail’ with a call that Tejpal realised that the 100-odd application solutions for Microsoft access that he was uploading on the net had caught the eye of the software major. It didn’t matter to them that Tejpal wasn’t a professional — he was a retired railways engineer who seemed to enjoy reading books on Visual Basic and database applications as much as he liked Ken Follet and Isaac Asimov.

Unlike most of his colleagues, Tejpal thought he would sit back after retirement. “I had decided that I would not take up another job, spend time at home, away from the madness of Delhi and teach children,” says Tejpal.

But 12 years after retirement, Tejpal is a ‘solutions provider’ for people using Microsoft database applications across the world.

It all started with the Celeron processor computer that he bought to keep in touch with his daughter Archana in California. “I soon started reading up on Microsoft office and got hooked on to Microsoft Access, which is a database application. I first began with a database solution for Thai airways four years back” he says.

Six years down the line, the old Celeron has given way to a fourth generation Pentium processor, two 320 GB hard disks and a 4 GB RAM along with the innumerable books he buys every month from Connaught Place or asks his daughter to get from California.

“Every problem is a challenge,” he says.

Aanchal Bansal, NEW DELHI