Age Is Just a Number: A Life Lived in Full Colour

At 55, Smita Ramprakash wakes up most mornings around seven, a little later than she'd like, since she often stays up past midnight filming reels. By the time most people are still reaching for their first cup of coffee, she has already put the kettle on, handed her 86-year-old mother her morning medications, and settled into a quiet spiritual practice before the day's real work begins: cooking, gardening, dancing, acting.

It's a full day. It always has been.

An Ordinary Girl With an Extraordinary Discipline

She describes her childhood simply: an ordinary schoolgirl in Bangalore, playing with friends, buried in homework, tests and exams like everyone else. But even then, something set her apart. She was, in her own words, "a studious girl," someone who worked hard for good grades, first in school, Cluny Convent and Malleswaram Ladies Association, and later at Mount Carmel College, where she took her bachelor's degree.

What made her days full wasn't only academics. At the age of five, she began learning Bharatanatyam, and alongside it, Carnatic music. Over time she let go of music but held on to dance, performing at recitals throughout her school and college years, and continuing to dance, in one form or another, for the next two decades.

Later came a postgraduate degree in medical microbiology from Kasturba Medical College, Manipal, a serious, science-driven turn for a girl who had grown up on rhythm and raga. It's a combination that, in hindsight, tells you everything about how she has built her life: never choosing between the practical and the passionate, but holding both at once.

Marriage, Work, and the Quiet Art of Balance

After her studies, she married and stepped into the long, layered work of adulthood, building a career while raising her family, learning early what she now calls simply "work-life balance." It's a phrase many people use loosely. For her, it has been a lived, daily discipline: showing up fully at work, and showing up fully at home, without shortchanging either.

Today, that balance looks different. Since 2023, she has stepped back from her professional work to care for her mother full-time. It is not a small sacrifice, she speaks of it plainly, without self-pity, simply as the next chapter of the same lifelong habit of showing up for the people and things that need her.

And yet, stepping back from one thing has not meant stepping away from herself.

A Second Act, In Full View

She is, by her own cheerful admission, "still active on social media." She makes reels, often built around acting, sometimes solo, sometimes in collaboration with other creators, and treats each one as practice. Watching herself back, she says, lets her see clearly whether a scene was overacted, underfelt, or just right. It's a discipline she's carried over from her years as a theatre artist.

That visibility has opened real doors. She's taken on guest roles in Kannada television series and films, selectively, and only when a part genuinely interests her, since a long-term commitment isn't possible while she's caring for her mother. She has modelled too, once walking the ramp for CKC Jewellers, back in 2019, and hopes to return to more of it when time allows. Her Bharatanatyam training hasn't left her either, a back condition has slowed the brisk movements, but she still dances to any song with a good rhythm, letting the lighter gestures carry what the years have taken from her knees.

A Day Built Out of Small Devotions

Ask her what an ordinary day looks like, and she'll walk you through it almost lovingly: breakfast and medication for her mother, a little time with her faith, then cooking, during which she multitasks, slipping out to water the plants or prune the garden while the pressure cooker works. She photographs the wildflowers that bloom in her compound, posting them on WhatsApp status with captions she writes herself, delighting in things most people walk past without noticing. She feeds the neighbourhood cats each evening.

Nothing here is extraordinary on its own. Together, it is a portrait of a woman who has decided, deliberately, to fill her ordinary hours with intention.

The Voice of Her Father, Still Speaking

When asked about the hardest period of her life, she says simply that she hasn't had one, "by God's grace," and that she hopes she never will. If there is a single guiding voice in her life, it belongs to her late father, who taught her that whatever you do, however small, you do with passion, and you give it everything. Don't grumble about your chores, he told her; do them with interest instead. He has been gone for some years now. She says he still inspires her.

That philosophy of hers extends outward into a broader worldview shaped by Buddhism and Stoic thought, not as religion, she's careful to clarify, but as a practical guide to living: live in the present, not the past or the future, and be mindful in whatever you're doing.

Age, in that light, becomes almost beside the point. "Aging is just physical," she says. Her body may be slowing in places, but she refuses to let it slow her mind, and it shows, in every reel, every wildflower photograph, every ramp walk still ahead of her.

Life, she says, is the way we choose to look at it. Colourful. Beautiful. Full of ups and downs we need in order to learn anything at all.