Milk lady showed dedication in 1976 floods too

“I went and got 10 kgs of rice to stock up for the whole family,” she reminisces, “MGR had just come to power,” she adds with a smile. She is pardonably wrong though, MGR came a few months later in 1977. Four decades later, a similar spell of torrential rains has catapulted the 60-year-old to international social media fame.

On the morning of December 2, 2015, Radha woke up at 4 am as usual and went to the Aavin pick up point at 5 am sharp. By 6, she was at Srividhya Apartments, with 300 packets of milk. She had braved chest-level waters to get the milk and bring it to her customers. Just the previous night, Chennai had received 30 cm rainfall.

As she was returning from the apartment complex, a resident Padma Ramani clicked a picture of her, and it was posted online by the me. The tweet has got more than 3000 re-tweets and over 2000 likes. The tweet grabbed so much attention that viral-content websites picked it up and international news websites carried also. By the afternoon of December 2, Radha was an Internet celebrity.

Radha is a certified vendor with Aavin — Tamil Nadu’s state milk cooperative — and has been in the milk-delivery business for 32 years now. She has a son, Nilakandan, who is a van-driver and a daughter Devaki, and both have delivered milk at some point in their lives. “At the peak of my career, I was delivering 1200 packets a day,” she says with pride.

Today, Radha doesn’t need the money. It helps, but she could stop if she wanted to. Her kids will take care of her. But why did she have to deliver milk that morning? It’s not the money, and her customers wouldn’t dare admonish her for not turning up. She reacts with a surprised look, the idea of not turning up is unthinkable. “So many people are dependent on me, how can I not go? And so much milk would go waste if I don’t deliver it!”

“Look what happened this morning,” she says. On Friday morning, as Chennai limped back to normalcy, there were street-fights over milk, with a litre being sold for Rs. 100. People stood in long queues for hours to get milk.

“Kaathu adichalum, mazhai peyinjalum, naan paal potruven (even if the wind is blowing or the sky is pouring, I will deliver the milk),” she says. 

Excerpts from an article, originally published on the site 

www.thenewsminute.com.