My father’s story.

In March this year, my father tripped in the living room and fractured his wrist. An open fracture, leading to surgery. His second bone surgery in two years. He cannot lift his grandson.

He was, for most of his life, the strongest person I knew. Not in any physical sense, but in every other one that matters. The eldest of seven children who lost his parents early, he dropped out of engineering to finish a quicker bachelor’s degree and secure a bank job. He supported his brothers and sisters through their first years of independence and through their weddings, before he had properly begun his own life. Presentable, warm, respected at work and in the wider community.

His first major health setback came at 60 — a heart attack, and an angioplasty. He recovered remarkably. He started walking two hours every day, morning exercise and evening walks, and stayed social and engaged. It looked like a turning point. Like he had found something.

Then he had his first fracture, through pure bad luck. That was two years ago; he was 73. The recovery was long, with prolonged rest. After that, his physical capability became a constant battle of small gains followed by setbacks. I carry the guilt of not pushing him harder through that second phase. His balance became unreliable. A ten-minute walk exhausted him. And then, in March, the second fracture. The wrist.

He is still positive. He still carries himself with a kind of quiet dignity that I find hard to watch, because I know what he was, and I can see the distance between that and now.

Why me

I have been training seriously since I was a teenager.

In India, in my college and work circles, this made me an oddity. Fitness was vanity. The gym was for people who did not take academics or their careers seriously, or who did not have real responsibilities. The idea that you might actually prioritise your physical health was quietly considered unnecessary. A little un-Indian, in a way that is difficult to articulate.

At 19, a professional trainer friend trusted me to take over an important client — a businessman in his forties — for two months while my friend dealt with a personal emergency. The client came back saying they were some of the best training sessions he had had. I remember thinking: this matters. The knowledge and the ability to make a real change in someone’s life matters.

Life, as it does, had other plans. A career, a family, moving countries. But after twenty-odd years of staying functionally strong and active, I can tell you there is no secret. The template for staying healthy is proven, uncomplicated if you want it to be, and accessible to everyone at every age.

My own template has changed constantly with my access to time, facilities, interests and knowledge. Sport, weightlifting, swimming, yoga. Not all of it at once — just whatever was practical, enjoyable and useful for my physical and mental wellbeing at that stage of life. Two and a half decades of it.

Why now

I am not projecting. I say this because I understand it now with a clarity I did not have when I was younger: I am watching my father’s story play out in a lot of Indian homes. They are my cousins, my friends, my colleagues. I see it in the WhatsApp messages about whose father had a fall, whose mother had hip surgery, whose parents have moved in because they can no longer manage alone.

For my father’s generation, health was something you addressed once it became a problem. But I am seeing the early patterns already in the generation behind them — the forty- and fifty-somethings who are busy, sandwiched between career, family and caring for ageing parents, ignoring their own body signals. The bad knee. The joint pain. The back. The tiredness they have started calling ageing.

They are my father, a few decades earlier. And they still have time.

That is why PRABAL exists. To solve the problems you can feel right now, built on a very personal understanding of what happens when you do not.

I am going to be honest and direct with you in a way I wish someone had been with my father.

He turned 75 this year. I am trying my best to change his story.

Yours is still being written.

Jay M.