Come my friends, ’tis not too late to seek a newer world.” — Tennyson
They come from all walks of life to live the American dream: struggling scholars, brilliant academicians, young brides and mothers… They come, clinging to the security of their cultural roots—blossoming only when they sip the multicultural nectar of a country that breathes and lives freedom in every sense of the word. Khabar caught up with Indian American immigrants of all ages to talk about their life journeys. What emerged was a kaleidoscope of self-affirmation as they recalled their journeys to describe how they continue to create a haven of enrichment for themselves and future generations in this land of opportunity.
The Beginning
Giriraj Rao narrowly escaped death as his journey began in a bus that took him to Bombay harbor. He recalls, “It was 1947. Our bus had just made it to Bombay harbor while subsequent buses were set on fire as communal riots erupted downtown. We escaped death by 30 minutes.” On his way to study at the University of California at Berkley on government scholarship, Mr. Rao and 250 fellow Indians boarded a ship that had been deployed to ferry supplies across the Atlantic in World War II. It took them thirty days to reach San Francisco, only to be stranded by a maritime strike while waiting for clearance to disembark. “We had no food or water. [Shore] vendors threw us sandwiches for twenty-five cents. We caught every one of those sandwiches only to discover they were bologna sandwiches, and I was a vegetarian. That was the moment of truth for me. Was I going to be a scrupulous Hindu, or eat meat to survive? Let’s just say I survived!”
Dr. K.K. Vijai embarked on his oceanic journey in 1961. It took him 30 days to reach London, where he missed a connecting flight en route to Purdue University in Indiana. He survived to tell his tale: “The flight I missed had crashed. My parents had no idea whether I was alive or dead.”
Padma Shah was the first in her family to go against tradition, first by finishing college in 1942, then in 1944 by flying to the US alone to join her fiancée who was at MIT. “The next thing I knew, I was being featured in the newspaper as the fiancée who flew 10,000 miles to be with her man. Later, several Americans got together and arranged our wedding ceremony in Indiana.”
In spite of standing first in both BSC and MSC and having done pioneering work in neuroscience, Dr. Sohan Manocha could not find a decent job in India. Being a poor farmer’s son, he just did not have the connections. An impulsive decision to head to the Canadian embassy to try his luck abroad landed him ten simultaneous job offers. He accepted a two-year fellowship offered by the Ontario Cancer Foundation. A couple of years later he met one of the people who had examined his thesis and was offered an Assistant Professorship in Neuroscience at Emory University. “I arrived in March 1965 from a city with minus fifteen degree temperatures, to a city with seventy-two degree weather and greenery I had not seen for ages. I thought we were making an emergency landing in some forest when the plane descended. Atlanta was so wooded and beautiful, and that was it for me.”
The Initiation
As our immigrants recovered from their first impression of America, they found themselves being initiated in different ways.
Giriraj Rao remembers his vegetarian diet being limited to egg sandwiches, ice cream, and bowls of fried rice at the only Chinese restaurant near campus. Padma Shah had her first taste of unboiled, pasteurized milk. Subhash Razdan, who arrived for an MBA, happily ate beef unknowingly and says the only time he has ever had a twenty-nine inch waistline was in his early college days because he did not even know how to boil an egg. (He is quick to note now he makes nargisi koftas to die for.) Narsi Narsimhan, who came here as a student, had his strictly Brahmin Tamil friend ordering a cheeseburger because hamburger had ham in it.
Subra Viswananthan arrived with a herd of IT professionals and spent the first few days trying to figure out whether the shower curtain stayed inside or outside the tub. Soon he was doing the usual desi things. “I have pictures of me posing next to every USA landmark.” laughs Subra.
Dr. Vijai bathed Indian style in a bathroom with wooden floors not realizing that his landlady was unwittingly showering along with him downstairs as water flooded and seeped through the floor. “I also got a B my first semester because a friend introduced me to the night life. Since he was doing his Ph.D., I thought that was how life was in the university in the States!” Dr. Vijai studied and worked part time while wife Girija babysat kids for twenty-five cents to make ends meet.
Kishore Ramchandran came as a post-graduate student to Wisconsin. His American friends would sneak in on him to see if he was in a compromising situation only to find him asleep in a lungi. The Americans were curious as anything, “Hey man, what are you doing sleeping in a skirt?”
Ashish Dharamrup had a cushy job in India with an ace traveling agency and had traveled the world, until a friend enticed him to come to New York to start something there. When he did arrive, there was nothing available. He took a job selling garments with a less-than-thoughtful Indian business owner. Ashish lived out of a suitcase and shoveled snow on the sidewalks when he wasn’t spending hours cajoling women to buy salwar kameez. He once walked miles after nabbing a shopping cart to put his suitcase in after he realized there were no taxis or public transport where his bus had dropped him en route to a friend’s place.
Digging Roots
Every immigrant digs firmer roots on American soil throughout their journey.
The university exposed Giriraj Rao to people of many cultures. “My first roommate was a big follower of Khan Abdul Ghafar Khan and was against the division of India, and then the other one was a Muslim from Bengal but wanted Pakistan to be created. It was quite a sight, two Muslims fighting each other and a Hindu in the middle trying to hold the peace!” Mr. Rao was very pleasantly surprised by the camaraderie between the professors and their students. “There was a cordiality I had never experienced in India, where our professors treated us as peons. Here we had professors fixing dinners for their students.”
Kishore Ramchandran currently teaches computer science at Georgia Tech. He recalls “the time we were being instructed as teaching assistants by a professor who had this little guy running around in shorts handing out papers. We were pretty much ignoring him thinking he was her son, when she pointed to him and said, ‘Now let me introduce Professor Charlie Fisher to you.’ and our jaws dropped!” Prof P.V. Rao agrees. “We are not used to such [casual] behavior in India. It took me a while to unfreeze myself and be on first name terms with my professors.” He was once waiting for a senior lady professor who was talking to a senior teaching assistant. “When he came out, I asked him if Angie was free. The T.A. lowered his voice and said she is not free but she is relatively inexpensive!”
Perhaps the single most important lesson students learned was the dignity of labor in this country. Narender Reddy recalls coming to Indiana after quitting a well-paying job in India, and then struggling through the cold weather, loneliness and then working in the cafeteria for extra money. “The first day I worked at the cafeteria, I came to my apartment and cried. I thought, ‘Why am I here doing menial chores?’ Such is the mindset when we come from India.” Giriraj Rao agrees. “I learned to be waiter, snack and food manager before I left the campus. This is the type of experience students don’t have when they come here.” Lucky Jain who was already a practicing pediatrician in India and had arrived on a Rotary scholarship recalls how humbling it was to go from an ace physician to moonlighting as a nursing assistant to make some extra money to pay for books and other necessities. “I was overqualified for jobs like giving an injection or putting in a catheter, but that’s all they had available.”
Giriraj Rao fell in love and married an American and then returned to India armed with the knowledge he had gained and the sense of liberation he felt. “I no longer had the peon mentality. I was ready for India.” His enthusiasm curdled when he discovered the India he had left behind was full of corrupt officers. And his irate mother, who was convinced he was not married, staged what Mr. Rao refers to as “suicide strikes against me. She even fell into the well one time.” Disillusioned, he returned to the US to face discrimination as he looked for jobs in California where his wife was already a teacher on contract. “An Indian was not a known commodity in the late 1940 and 50s. We had problems even finding a house. When we finally did buy one, our neighbor complained, ‘since when have you started allowing these Mexicans in here?’” laughs Mr. Rao. Atlanta provided similar problems in the early 1970s, when Rao came as an employee of the Coca-Cola Company. “My wife did not want to come to Atlanta. In 1973, a white woman married to a non-American, especially a dark one with only white teeth, was definitely frowned upon! Things are very different now, but I still feel returning to the US was the best decision I could have ever made.”
Dr. Bhagirath Majmudar sought to absorb as much as he could of the way medicine was being taught in the US and take the knowledge back to India with him. He was pleasantly surprised by the practical demonstration of the concepts taught in India. Yet he notes though India was lacking technically, the amazing amount of commonsense practices that physicians displayed in India, perhaps due to excessive population, seemed lacking in the USA. Dr. Majmudar also noticed that even though people were very learned in Boston, he had to stay one step ahead to prove his worth. “Mistakes were not easily forgotten and somehow the comments were such that those mistakes were tied to your being from India. It was tight-rope dancing but I thrived on it.” Dr. Majmudar adds that Bostonian arrogance was not just limited to India. When he told colleagues he was going to teach at Emory in Atlanta, his boss drawled, “Hey Maj, don’t leave the country so soon!” Dr. Majmudar also noticed what seemed to be initial reservations from Southerners in accepting him. “That was how it was, but here in the South, once they accept you, they do it with all their heart. In other parts of the country they might accept you at a professional level but that’s where you might stay for the rest of your life.”
Still Dr. Majmudar says Boston was amazing as far as his professional and personal growth was concerned. There is such an emphasis on expanding the horizons of the mind that you have no choice but to learn and continuously learn. His wife Uma has her own remarkable story to tell. She came to the country as a professor, having taught in India at a college in Gujarat. A writer, public speaker, and A-grade drama artist and radio personality, Uma put everything on hold as she raised her daughters. She dabbled with writing on the side while taking two buses in the evening for public speaking classes when her husband would come home. Uma has recently completed a Ph.D. at Emory and is now in the midst of writing a book on Mahatma Gandhi. “ It’s only in this country that you can do that. In India the key word was obedience, here the country teaches you to be independent, to be what you want to be, to do what you want to do, to grow at your own pace, and to go whichever direction you want to take.”
Khurram Hassan has lived in various countries because his father worked for an international Pakistani Bank, the BCCI. Khurram hails from the laid-back culture of the Cayman Islands. At the age of sixteen, He was thrust into a very expensive, preppie high school that ate into a lot of his father’s income. “I was one of a handful of kids from the middle income group,” recalls Khurram. “I also realized that America is a tough place for youngsters. You grow up very quickly. America doesn’t really allow children to be children, because you start dealing with adult issues like sex, drugs, and alcohol very early in life, and you don’t have a lot of adults to guide you. You have to handle a lot of these situations on your own. I was a straight A student but my grades slipped as I realized I was not liking the environment too much and was ready to get out. Initially the thoughts of freedom and independence that I would find were very exciting, but later I realized that the relationships and the close knit environment I grew up in was irreplaceable and freedom didn’t compensate for what I had lost coming in to this country”. Khurram does say that he loved studying at Emory University. “ There is such an openness in American education, it gives you an amazing opportunity to think, express your ideas, and develop into such a well-rounded person.” Khurram volunteered in several organizations and became the first South Asian President of a black fraternity.
Subra Viswanathan came here in 1987 when he was only 22. For him the experience was more stereotypically “desi” because he lived in the same apartment complex with his fellow IT professionals. Most of them had only one goal: to make a lot of money and take it back. “It’s untrue that we come here and become Americanized. I think we only come here when we already believe in the American value system: freedom, being responsible for your own destiny, making independent choices.” For a Tamil Brahmin boy, who was reared to adhere to whatever was dished out, it took Subra a while to realize that your boss actually considers you an equal and you can be rewarded for having the courage to speak your mind and follow up with concrete results. Subra feels living in this country has helped him change the way he looks at life. It has given him the financial freedom to pursue music and other fulfilling interests. He has also redefined what religion means to him. “I would have been caught up in the rituals, some of which I don’t believe in, had I stayed in India. Now I have the freedom to think and understand the meaning behind each ritual, pick and practice what I believe in. This country clears your mind, because it teaches you to think for yourself.”
Alok Bhardwaj did initially focus on earning money to take back to India until he realized “that the values and the freedom in every aspect of American life… was what our religion and culture has taught us back home in the first place. The only difference is that these values are not couched in religious jargon, but are practiced here in the true sense of the word. This is not the decadent West that we have believed USA to be. There is so much that is good here and that was really the deciding factor that changed my mind.”
For Uma Sharma, it was quite an uprooting from the protective atmosphere of being the youngest child and an ace student in economics, to land in 30 inches of snow and to feel totally overwhelmed by the country, the accents, and the unknown. “I stayed with my sister and her wonderful husband who was so supportive. I cried every day. I never thought I would make it here. The first time I saw people outside our house while my sister was at work, I hid in a closet with my niece scared out of my wits thinking someone was going to break in. I was very intimidated by everything.” Uma’s sister encouraged her to evolve as a person, and pushed her to study computer science. “For a person from a middle class family with a degree in economics who had never seen a computer in her life, it was a petrifying thought to do a degree in the subject.” Uma soon got married and while her husband struggled with a new business, she studied 17 hours each day, cried bitter tears and worked with him, selling clothes in flea markets and in stores, only to ace every exam and finish an eighteen month course in six months. Now Uma is a top-notch executive with IBM and her husband a successful business man, but she says the single most important lesson she has learned in this country is that if you are willing to work hard you can make it.
Before he came to this country, Kishore Ramchandran had a poor impression of people in academics. “My perception in India was that anyone who came to academia did so because he could not find a better job. Coming to this country and seeing some amazing professors and the work they do made me change my mind and settle on teaching as a profession. The awards are immense.” Kishore is constantly amazed at the how honest and trustful Americans continue to be. “When I was a student there were these open book exams. We were not supposed to consult with anyone in these or the take home exams we had. I am absolutely confident the Americans followed the system honorably, while [other groups of] students would all converge in a corner and openly cheat.”
Perhaps another thing that has touched most immigrants is the generosity of American hospitality as well as their acceptance of Indians who settled in this country. “It was deeply touching to see how people were willing to help me at every stage, no matter where I went,” recalls Dr. Lucky Jain. Lucky, who started at the University of Pennsylvania and then ended up in the University of Illinois on full scholarship, remembers how the Chairman academically nurtured him, and how hard work was always rewarded in this country. Lucky is now a fully tenured professor—something he would never have dreamed of in India. “The South is still conservative, but I am perhaps one of the youngest clinical Professors in the School of Medicine in this generation, and it was a Southern gentleman who pushed it all through. When I go back to India, I see my peers are still far behind. The quality of medicine practiced there is 50 years behind. There are a few silver linings in big cities where we have flagship hospitals providing state-of-the-art care, but that is not the case in inner city or state-run hospitals.” Being in this country has empowered Lucky to go back and give to India. A few years ago, along with some fellow physicians, Lucky formed an organization called Physicians for Perinatal Care. They handpick Indians, train them in the latest newborn handling techniques, and send them to India armed with their knowledge.
Dr. Sohan Manocha had quite the opposite experience. Dr. Manocha, who was a fully tenured Professor of Neuroscience, had an unpleasant run-in with a troublemaker. Dr. Manocha took a leave of absence, went to law school in his late forties, and has been a successful attorney for the last eighteen years. Dr. Manocha says that experience brought the revelation that America lets you change career paths at an age when you would be considered over the hill in India. “That is the great thing about this country. You get the second chance to reinvent yourself.”
It was a lesson Neera Bahl learned quickly. Born into an aristocratic family, Neera was married off at a young age and came to Florida where her husband Vijay was part of a successful hotel business. Soon their business slumped and they moved to Canada. “I baby sat kids and did household work for people just to make ends meet.” The princess learned to pinch pennies. They moved back to the US as business picked up, and Neera took a job in research at the University of Alabama. When business fell again, they moved to Atlanta where she found work at Emory. As business stabilized, Neera entered law school. “I worked in the mornings and attended school in the evenings. My son’s first day at high school was my first day of law school. We even did our homework together. This is the most amazing thing about this country. You continue to, at any age, discover your potential, reinvent yourself. This country gives you wings again and again. Its up to you to fly as high as you want.”
Sangita Patil agrees. As her husband established himself, she raised two sons and completed a degree in computer science. “It took me a while, but I have learned to be independent and self-sufficient. I know no matter what, I can handle anything on my own, and it is a truly liberating feeling to be your own person, especially as a woman. It is something you will never find in India.”
Rajul Gokarn is her own person. She came from an elite Bombay family and at eighteen fell in love with a South Indian professor with a family to support. The love match with Yoganand was frowned upon. Rajul emigrated to the US. Yoganand later followed on a scholarship. She married him at 21and they studied together. “He was my best friend,” she says. Four years later, after winning Outstanding Professor for the second year at Georgia State University, Yoganand was killed in a car accident. Rajul walked away unscathed in body, deeply wounded in soul. She was twenty-five years old. She refused an offer to take over her late husband’s dissertation, and through the pain of loss and loneliness, returning night after night to the same apartment where they had shared so much academically and personally, she aced every exam. The day she received her Ph.D., there was not a single dry eye in the auditorium. Many years later, at thirty-six years of age, she found herself pregnant while casually dating a young American. Rajul decided to have the baby out of wedlock, and is a single parent who remains close to her child’s father. Daughter Anjali is now 12 and a super achiever. Rajul, a professor of accounting, has lived life on her own terms. “The people who gossiped both here and in India now applaud me for my courage, and my decision to evolve as I saw right, and I have some amazing American friends who are there for me round the clock.” Rajul says the freedom to evolve as an individual in a country where you have to learn to fend for yourself gave her the courage to be her own person.
Teach your children well
What are these immigrants’ children missing and what have they gained by living in America?
Alok feels no matter how much he tries to foster Indian values, his daughters are missing out on the richness of the Indian culture. “Still, the opportunities they have in this country for personal growth are so immense that they are bound to develop in a much more well-rounded way than they would have in India”. Alok’s wife Shachi feels a lot of immigrants are frozen in time, still imagining India to be as it was twenty or thirty years ago. She feels she is able to instill a better awareness of Indian culture in America than she would have been able to in India, where scholarly pursuit of the culture is dwindling, and no one even explains the meanings of the shlokas. “Here we sit and recite them and then discuss the meaning.”
Kishore Ramchandran also adds that American children are learning to be more open minded, more aware, and have the freedom to question anything. “There is also less competition here as compared to India, just because of the population. The people who come here are in the top tier themselves so their children are usually academically gifted and in the top of their class. So the level of confidence they have here is high. Even the extracurricular activities that they want to indulge in are financially within their reach. My nephew, who is a nationally ranked tennis player, had to opt for academics over tennis because in India the concept of what is valuable is different. Here anyone can give anything a shot and make it or start all over again in a different direction.”
“I am privileged to have two challenged children. My son Pratik is hearing impaired and because of the facilities available here went from being a special-ed. student to an exceptionally gifted one. There is no way he could have managed that in India” say Subra Viswanathan. Pratik is also a gifted musician.
Dr. P.V Rao jokes that his younger daughter says she grew up in general body meetings in Atlanta. The Raos came to Atlanta in 1966 and started a close interaction with about 100 Indian families. Not only has he evolved as a person, says Dr. Rao, continuing to learn, he feels his children have benefited tremendously as well. “As immigrants we have to pool our resources and create an atmosphere of India. We are transplanted from another country and we have to show our children the traditions and values to follow. And if you create a strong, nurturing atmosphere, they will appreciate our heritage. At the same time we have to move with the times and teach them appreciation of other cultures. In fact, my daughters are married to Americans and we have learned a lot about the Christian faith as a result.”
Subhash Razdan says his sons have absorbed the best of both worlds. They have learned to display the hospitality, warmth, family bonds and values that are so much a part of the Indian tradition. He does admit, “We have tried to give them a heavy dose of being Indian, at times much to their anguish. Fortunately that’s behind us as they have grown up into fine young men. In 1992, when they got their thread ceremony (janou) done in New York, Shri Swaminarayan personally placed the janou in these two boys out of 100 other boys present, because these boys were the only ones with clean shaven heads as Brahmins are supposed to have.”
Dr. Bhagirtath Majmudar says Hinduism is very complex and our children can never fully understand the religion unless they live in India. Dr. Majmudar spent a lot of time with his daughters creating a theme around every religious story he told them. He gave them the opportunity to analyze and question each tenet. He also gave them the opportunity to learn about other religions. He feels this country teaches children to discover so much of themselves that sooner or later they return to their roots. “My daughter Nija is now wanting not only to understand the tenets but to delve deep into the meaning of our religious beliefs. I feel that our forefathers were brilliant people and if we study our scriptures we will see how every modern day dilemma and enigma can be solved by a lesson from our sacred books.”
The Gift of America
For those who have created homes so far away from home, this has been a journey of enrichment.
Subhash Razdan says, “America is a great country that allows us such freedom. Imagine the extent and intensity of my India involvement. In any other country of the world, I would have probably been packed home. Only in America has it been possible for me to get an American shoe manufacturer to quit manufacturing shoes degrading Indian gods/goddesses, get even with Pat Robertson and his Hindu bashing, lash back at Southern Baptists after they insulted Hindus, and presented the first life-size statue of Mahatma Gandhi on US federal land. I could not have done half as much had I stayed in India.”
Khurram Hassan adds, “America allows me to be with those who have similar values and not condemn those who are not like me.” Ashok Goel says the salient feature about America is not freedom, but the ability of the people to regenerate and reinvent themselves. Dr. Majmudar puts it aptly when he says “Living in this country has enabled me to drink from all the rivers and oceans of the world, the globe is my center from where I can imbibe the essence of so many cultures”.
The journey continues as these immigrants and their future generations continue to learn, explore, and grow. With an open heart and an open mind, someday the circle will be complete. T.S. Eliot puts it aptly:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”