V Shruti Devi, V Kishore Chandra Deo.
Father's Day has come to be marked in various part of the world, including India, on the third Sunday of June, though it was set into legislation in 1972 in the USA by President Nixon. Some communities also celebrate the 19th of March as Father's Day.
An added significance of establishing the third Sunday of June as Father' Day, as far as Vedic astrology goes, in India, is the day's proximity to the summer solstice. The sun, in Vedic astrology, is a significator of a person's father.
Soothsaying might not be a pursuit that one immediately associates with V. Shruti Devi, the practicing advocate, politician, poet and author. Her curiosity for insights into astrology was fueled by her father's reading of, and mastery over the subject in the years when she was a college student.
Shruti's father, V. Kishore Chandra Deo, the former union cabinet minister in the INC-led cabinet, once presented Shruti a deck of tarot cards and books, and was of the view that she would be able to do better justice to those realms of divination, given her background of having studied English Literature at St. Stephen's College, and the intuitive analytical elements that such training involved. Tarot is a pastime that Shruti savors indulging in to this date, while also informing her father that ChatGPT is today capable of holding very convincing astrological dialectics!
During her school-going years in New Delhi in the 1980s, Shruti Devi was immensely inspired by her parents' charitable work, most of which revolved around her father's socialistic parliamentary career. In Deo's first term as a Congress Party MP in 1977, his party's leader was the late Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, whose dances with indigenous people as broadcast on black-and-white television, left a lasting impression on millions of people. Shruti also realized, early in life, the immense role that training in law could make, in parliamentary performance, and resolved to become a lawyer and politician. Her father's education and further education is in economics and political science, and her passion for political science is discernable in her approach to her life's works in politics and in authorship.
Shruti Devi's royal heritage is derived from both her parents, as her mother, V. Preeti Deo (the present Rani/Queen of the erstwhile Kurupam estate), was born the Princess of the erstwhile kingdom of Daspalla, Orissa, India. V. Kishore Deo is the Zamindar Raja (King) of the erstwhile Kurupam Zamindari estate, now in Andhra Pradesh, India, though the government also classifies them as Tribal hill Chiefs. Her family's faith in the divine feminine, in Shakti worship, has infused in her father, the temerity to face challenges thrown by life at a very young age.
With a passion for democratic values, for serving the downtrodden through politics, and to combat corruption, Shruti has grabbed the gauntlet of kindness, and played key roles in helping her father write his famous book on electoral reforms in the 1990s, has provided key inputs for the preparation of India's forest rights act of 2006 when her father was the chairman of the joint parliamentary committee that looked into the topic for parliament, as well as a daily slew of pro bono advisory opinions through her father's parliamentary terms this century.
When her father quit their party in 2019, Shruti was unwilling to part with a brand she had spent decades creating, and the duo competed for the same parliamentary seat, which is now ancient history.
Shruti's parents who are in their 70s, divide their time between Kurupam, where they attend to matters of their heritage home and grounds at The Fort, Sivvannapeta, Kurupam, and Gurgruam, Haryana, in the Delhi NCR, where their son, Shruti's brother, Shishir, lives with his wife and daughters. The Deos enjoy cooking, and are acknowledged gourmets in their own right. Outdoor adventure was a sector that Shruti's father had dabbled in as a youth, when he worked informally for his maternal uncle in one of the planet's first outdoor adventure companies, and which possibly inspires Shruti's fable, Creatures of the Current, which is otherwise inspired by her visit to a river-rafting camp on the Ganges in the Himalayas in 1999.
Father's Day is a reminder to treasure what one has received, and to value how one has played the cards that the universe has dealt out to one.
