After a journalist interviewed Leela Menon for a story, “Sitting Pretty in the Post Office,” Leela asked her husband if she could study journalism. He said “go ahead.” While continuing to work at the post office during the day, she began taking courses in the evening, eventually becoming Kerala's first female journalist.

A recent article described her as “a trailblazer in the field of journalism.”

I met Leela during my stay in India's coastal state of Kerala. My host, Ranjini Menon (no relation to Leela) is now a poised talk show anchor and considers Leela her mentor. Ranjini spent my first day telling me all about Leela and a bit about herself.

Ranjini was quite proud of her children and especially her youngest, 2 1/2-year-old Malavika, known as Ammu.

While flipping through Ammu's photo album, some family photos and ones of Ranjini were mixed in. In one, Ranjini was accepting an award. After asking her what for, she told me, “Oh, that's when I won the television award for best talk show host in India.”

She went on, nonchalantly, about how she started the first talk show on women's issues.

“Wow,” I said. “You're like the Oprah of India.”

Yes this conversation didn't last long. she quickly got back to Leela. Her mentor began her career late in life and kept her stories focused on women's issues. After starting at the Indian Express in Hyderabad as a headline writer, she later moved to the bureau in Kerala.

“When I came,” Leela recalls, “there were no women in the field, only in the office.”

Leela is known as the journalist who brought women's issues to the attention of the media. She has interviewed prostitutes, children being exploited as beggars and women abused or sexually harassed.

Despite several medical ailments, she never lost her drive to tell these stories.

When she was diagnosed with cancer, she was told she had six months to live, but she didn't cry. She would not think about death. She told me, instead, in her mind, she would always be thinking about what her next story would be.

Luckily, she didn't die, and she continued to investigate.

Ranjini said it is because of this woman that she and many others became journalists.