Chinna Dua

Some Lesser Known Facts About Chinna Dua

• Chinna Dua was an Indian radiologist and the wife of journalist Vinod Dua. She was known for possessing a wide collection of sarees.

• She grew up in a middle-class family in Delhi.

  

• Chinna Dua was a Tamilian, and her nickname, ‘Chinna,’ means “small” as she was the youngest among five sisters.

• After completing her medical studies, she started working at Diwan Chand Aggarwal Imaging & Research Centre as a gynecologist, where she retired on 30 January 2016 as a senior consultant.

• She studied at The Lady Irwin School in New Delhi and attended the Bengali section, where she developed an interest in saree after she watched the girls in saree during Durg Puja and Saraswati Puja. She was in the fourth standard when she wore a saree for the first time. Later, her maternal uncle (Mama) named K. D. Gupta gifted her a peach coloured saree.

• She had more than 400 hundred sarees from a range of varieties including Phulkari from Punjab, Madhubani and Bhagal Puri sarees from Bihar, and Taant, Dhakai, Tangail, Jamdani, Begumpuri, and Dhonekali sarees from Kolkata. Apart from these, she also had Kashmiri and Odiya sarees.

• In an interview when asked about her favourite saree, she replied,
  

  This is a tough question. I love different sarees for different reasons. Sometimes there is an emotion attached to it, sometimes it is my favorite color, sometimes I love the work on it. My most priced and prized possession is my Shikargah. It is a Benarasi ,pink with gold organza, which is a pure silver gold plated with fine jungle scene woven on it. It is a gift of love from my husband and I absolutely adore it.”

• She used to apply a liquid Bindi that resembled the embroidery pattern on her sarees, and it became a popular trend.

 

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A post shared by Chinna Dua (@chinnadua)

• In an interview, while talking about her Bindi style, she said,
  

  When I met my husband for the first time, I had made one in the form of 4 green rounds with a tiny dot in the center. I was wearing a green chikan saree that day. He loved the idea that I used to draw my own bindis.”

• In her leisure time, she loved singing and cooking, and she would often share the videos of her singing and cooking on Instagram.

 

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A post shared by Chinna Dua (@chinnadua)

• She suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder.

• On 11 June 2021, she died of COVID-19 in Gurgaon’s Medanta Hospital. Vinod Dua took to Facebook to share the news of her demise, where he wrote –
  

  Chinna no more.”

• She was fluent in various languages such as English, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, and Tamil.