I don’t need to sit. I can dance.” Jane Goodall announced to me, and she demonstrated by twirling around the front of the room. I had asked her assistant to get a chair for her so she could do her 9.30pm question/answer session sitting down rather than standing up. She was 90 years old at the time and in Mumbai on a four-day tour last Nov. I had been with her since 9am that morning when she arrived for her first event of the day during her trip to Mumbai. She gave a 45-minute unscripted keynote speech (standing!) and then graciously proceeded to be part of innumerable individual and group photos with the audience. She then gave another programme in the afternoon during which she again gave a 45-minute keynote – also standing – and returned to the hotel in the evening for the gala gathering by the British Council and Jane Goodall Institute of India. She lovingly offered to do a post-dinner Q&A. And no, she still did not need to sit down, as she made abundantly clear by her loving indignation when i suggested a chair.

This was Jane, my hero since at ten or eleven, i started plastering the walls of my bedroom with pages torn from National Geographic of photos of Jane with chimpanzees. Whenever anyone asked me “What do you want to be when you grow up?” my answer was clear: Jane Goodall.