India, Aug. 8 -- The first memory I have of Kiran (Joshi then) is of an ever-smiling young girl in the early 1980s, already precocious enough to be in preparatory college at 14 and walking from her home in Sector 27 to Sukhna Lake and back.

I was already some eight years into journalism and riding a moped. If I offered her a lift, she would turn it down with a broad smile, saying: "This my walking time." Just a year after joining a government college for girls in the city, she started making news as an activist, a theatre actor and more. She had the courage to challenge an oppressive principal, the wife of an influential bureaucrat, when it came to the rights of the students. One interesting incident I recall occurred in the midst of a s...