“I’m Back!”: Stories of Courage and Inspiration

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare
that things are difficult.”
— Seneca

This land is where dreamers awaken from their pilgrimage in search of a new life. Inevitably, therefore, America fosters stories that inspire and touch the heart, stories of ordinary people who beat the odds, physical and emotional, displaying an indomitable spirit to follow their dreams. In this season of good cheer, we bring you stories of some of these extraordinary “ordinary” men and women who did not allow the world to define them, but with determination and tenacity became who they wanted to be. Their stories inspire you to think and reevaluate what is important in life, demonstrate that faith and persistence can make the highest mountain a mere hillock, and help you understand that the heart-stopping bend in the road is no dead end. If only you are dogged enough, courageous enough, dreamy enough …

The Winner in a Wheelchair

Sungeeta Jain had just finished 5th grade in the summer of 1986 and was traveling with her family, asleep in the backseat of the car. She could not have imagined that when she woke up, she would find herself in a wheel chair.

In a freak accident that no one could explain, not even the police officers watching the car spin upside down twice, the world around the Jain family became a blur of police sirens, paramedics and dashes to the hospital. Sungeeta’s parents and siblings escaped with minor injuries, but Sungeeta who was not wearing a seat belt had her spine crushed. “There were doctors all around me sticking tubes in me and I could hear them tell my parents that I would probably never walk again. It was like waking up from this dream to find myself confined to a wheel chair,” recalls Sungeeta.

Sungeeta’s parents would go to every temple, spending thousands of dollars on prayer services, which the priests said would cure their daughter. “There was no happiness in the house, until my parents decided they were not going to continue with this madness any more, and that if God had to heal me He would on his own.”

For Sungeeta it was relearning everything from scratch. “We had to remodel the house to make it wheelchair accessible. I had to learn to do everything without being able to feel my legs. The physical part was easier . It was the mental and emotional healing that took a lot longer. For the first few years I used to be very depressed, specially whenever there was a holiday or my birthday.”

While the Jains were remodeling their home, an Ethiopian man came to take measurements for remodeling and seeing Sungeeta told the family he was a Christian minister in Ethiopia and that he wanted to pray for her and did not want any thing in return. He would do so every day and talk to the family about the bible and Jesus. They were so moved that they converted to Christianity. “Ever since we started believing in Jesus there was a new peace in our house and a new happiness.”

Sungeeta says she was fortunate that the school she went to made every effort to ensure she got an all-round education. “My gym teacher actually got another wheel chair and so one other student would sit in a wheel chair and the kids used to fight over who got to do that because it was so much fun. That year after my accident I acted in a school play, I was the student body president, maintained a 4.0 GPA and went on to get an undergrad degree in engineering and a law degree.”

Sungeeta’s parents always told her she could do anything she wanted and so at 17, when she received an invitation to participate in Miss Teen of Washington beauty pageant, while she hesitated because she had never seen a person in a wheelchair at such pageants, her parents encouraged her to go ahead and have fun. Sungeeta went on to win the crown, becoming perhaps the only person in a wheelchair in the world to win such a competition against able bodied girls. This opened up opportunities for Sungeeta to speak in public and do community work. She went to schools and talked to kids about safety. “I actually wasn’t wearing a seat belt when I was in the accident and I spoke to kids about safety and on overcoming obstacles. The focus must be on what you can do rather than what you can’t do. I told them how you can achieve anything you want to do and let nothing hold you back.”

Sungeeta Jain woke up to find herself in a wheelchair.

Sungeeta says what annoys her most is a perception among many people that if someone is physically disabled there must be something wrong with them mentally.

“People are scared to approach you. In India people hide their handicapped family members who become the sad family secret. In America that was true in the past but then having a President like FDR who was confined to a wheelchair changed things.”

Sungeeta says she has been discriminated against many times. One instance was when the pageant director of the Miss India Washington pageant refused to let her participate in the event giving lame excuses. “I guess he didn’t want his Miss India in a wheelchair. At that time I used to write for India West and after that incident I wrote about disability awareness, and I talked about how I may not be able to walk, but that did not make me a lesser person. I was not asking him to make me Miss India. I was just asking him to let me participate.”

Sungeeta had the last laugh when she went on to become Miss SeaFair, a pageant the winner of the Miss India Washington also participates in.

Sungeeta says that one of her biggest goals is to move to India and start an orphanage and a school there, even though she was born and brought up in this country. She is in the process of registering a non-profit organization to begin fund raising for the project. She loves to act and dreams of acting in a film and of being a judge some day, but more than that she wants to give a message to people to have faith that anything is possible if they set their minds to it. “I am the prime example, that nothing can hold you back if you believe in yourself and have faith in God.”

Women of Steel

Another woman of steel is Satya Dutt. Married in 1949 to a very successful businessman in India, Mulk Raj Dutt, she has experienced many highs and lows in her life. A cyclone destroyed her husband’s factory and they lost their infant son within a year of marriage.

Dutt came to USA in the 1960s to look for business opportunities, survived a plane crash and a near fatal accident “When he recovered there were huge medical bills to pay; that was the reason why he decided to stay back in the USA, otherwise he had no plans to settle down here,” she recalls.

Dutt saw that there was no department store in Chicago. Having little money, he borrowed from friends and went on to establish a very successful business. Just as life turned rosy again, with older son Kamal handling the family business along with his father, tragedy struck.

Her younger son, who had been diagnosed with muscular dystrophy, and her husband with lung cancer died within a short span of each other. Struggling to recover from the shock her faith in God somehow pulled her through, but as if that was not enough a few years later her youngest daughter’s son was also diagnosed with muscular dystrophy and her son in law who was an amazing support for her daughter died suddenly in 1995 on their wedding anniversary. That was the first time in my life that my faith was truly shattered.

“It was my older son Kamal whose support and my faith in God that has kept me going.” Perhaps the story that stands out in this family is that of older daughter Poonam, who came to this country as a teenager. She was well educated, and fiercely independent, but when she was 18 she was sent off to a village in India to marry the son of an elite businessman, whom she had never met. She was very uncomfortable about the alliance and saw that even her father seemed to have his doubts, but kept quiet because the “family honor” was at stake. “I ended up becoming the sacrificial lamb in an arranged alliance between two families,” says Poonam.

Poonam eventually ended up divorcing her husband. Her son Salil was a toddler at that time. But Poonam’s ordeal was far from over. Even as she was healing from this first failed marriage, she went through a second rocky marriage. She finally walked out on that marriage too and went to school while working at multiple jobs. “I lived at one time, in the ghetto in a little place rented to me by some jailbird. I used to do everything for my son, even sew clothes for him, because I didn’t have the money. Even McDonald’s was expensive for us. If we had extra money we’d go and rent a dollar movie. If Salil was sick, I’d just wrap him in a blanket and take him to class.” Her family found out only after three years what she had been going through. Her brother Kamal even offered to buy her a business but she refused and decided to make it on her own. “Initially they thought I was crazy to rough it out alone, but when they realized I was very determined to make it on my own, they slowly became supportive and started helping out.” She is happily married now to husband number three, Dushyant Mahuakar and says that “this experience has made me more courageous, and not afraid to take risks. After all what is the worst that could happen? I have already been to hell and back.” Poonam is now a successful entrepreneur, building her dream home in California with Dushyant.

Simran, (name changed) who had married at 21, while her husband Ashok (name changed) was still a student, came to this country in 1976. She worked three jobs to support him while he went to U.S. university. However, Ashok very abusive, both physically and emotionally, and her in-laws did not treat her well either. In spite of her parents encouraging her to get out of the relationship, she did not. “There is such stigma attached to divorce, that I felt ashamed to let the skeletons out.”

Amidst her problems with Ashok, she took fertility drugs and had twin girls. “Even that was a problem since they were not boys.” A few years later Simran had gone to visit her family in India, when her husband liquidated all their assets, wiped out her savings account, sold their home, resigned from the university where he was teaching and moved to India where he filed for divorce and sued for child custody. She returned to the US, to find everything gone and was literally out on the streets. “I went to welfare but they looked at my husband’s financial records and said I did not qualify for welfare.”

Finally in desperation she became a cab driver and has earned her living as one since the mid 1990s. “I felt so ashamed that I stopped talking to my friends, until they finally came to me and said they were very proud of me. As a cab driver I have been mugged on gunpoint, my face slashed and been scratched by a woman. It has been very tough, but you cannot sit at home in fear. I was academically very gifted but my husband had not let me study further. It was his way of controlling my life.” The child custody battle continues, though her twin daughters who are now 15, live with her. Her life revolves around raising her daughters, one of whom is a national merit scholar, and an all round achiever. She feels that she may not have discovered this determination and courage had she not faced these odds. She has not remarried and plans to devote her life to her children.

Rajul Gokarn is a prime example of how adversity brings out the best in people. Rajul came from an elite family of Bombay and at 18 fell in love with a South Indian professor who came from a different social strata with a family to support. Their love match was frowned upon. Rajul arrived in the United States and her husband Yoganand followed on a scholarship. She married him at 21and they studied together. “He was my best friend,” she says. Four years later after winning the out-standing professor award for the second timeat Georgia State University, Yoganand was killed in a fatal car accident while Rajul survived unscathed in body, but deeply wounded in soul. She was 25 years old.

She chose to stay on and succeed, refused an offer to take over her late husband’s dissertation, and through the pain, her loss, and sheer loneliness returning night after night to the same apartment where they had shared so much academically and personally, and aced every exam. The day she received her Ph.D, there was not a single dry eye in the auditorium.

Many years later at 36 she found herself pregnant, while casually dating a young American. Rajul decided to have the baby out of wedlock and is a single parent though her child’s father has stayed close to her daughter Anjali who is now 13 and a super achiever. Rajul who is a professor of accounting has lived life on her own terms.

Just as life became comfortable and Rajul got her tenure, in May, three days after celebrating her 50th birthday, Rajul was diagnosed with breast cancer. She took it in her stride, to have mastectomy, breast reconstruction, rounds of chemotherapy that caused severe nausea and blisters that made it impossible to even swallow her own spit. Through it all her spirit remains indomitable. “What I learnt from my life with my late husband was that you live like there is no tomorrow and that there is so much to live for; to not to put things off. Though we were married for only four years, he was my soulmate and I have very few regrets about the short time I had with him. I see the same spirit in my daughter and now because of her there is no question of giving up. I deeply believe that if you cannot have it given to you, fight for it. I also think that since I had the freedom to evolve as an individual in a country where you have to learn to fend for yourself, it gave me the additional courage to take the less easier road.”

From Degree to Decree

Shyamala Rajender chose to take the less easier road in India itself. Born in a family of academicians in South India Shyamala wanted to go to medical school. At 19 she was married to a police officer instead and soon tired of socializing. “When I said I wanted to go for further studies I was told I was too old and since I was married to a well-to-do person so why did I want to go to school and deprive some deserving man the opportunity to be a physician?”

When she did not get any response from colleges in India, she applied to the University of Wyoming who not only accepted her but gave her a full scholarship. When her family found out there was an uproar. “Every one thought I was this Jezebel who was leaving two little kids and a husband behind and would probably run away with some American later on. My husband, however ,did not stand in my way and told me to give it a shot. I promised if it did not work out I will come back but if I did not give it a shot I will regret it forever.” Shyamala landed in Wyoming and aced academically. Her husband and kids too joined her later.

Shyamala Rajender won a landmark employment discrimination case.

After she received her PhD in Chemistry Shyamala received a research grant for post doctoral work from the University of Minnesota and was later offered a faculty position . When she was not given tenure after 8 years, Shyamala asked for a reason. She says she was told, “We have 46 faculty members and all are men. We cannot give you tenure because being a woman they won’t like you there, and also because of your national origin they will not accept you.”

Shyamala filed a formal grievance, a complaint with the equal employment opportunity commission and then in federal court. As a result the university did not renew her contract and Shyamala could not find another job. “I found out I was blacklisted in the academic circles in the entire country”.

So to utilize her time Shyamala went to law school. The case took 7-8 years and Shyamala won a landmark ruling from U.S. District Judge Miles Lord, in the first employment discrimination class action ever tried, who ruled in 1980: “It is heerby ordered and decreed: The University is permanently enjoined from discrminating against women on the basis of sex..” Under the terms of the settlement Rajender received $100,000 from the university (her lawyers reportedly received $1.5 million, the highest fee award in a civil rights case at the time).

Says Rajender: “It made history. It was the first case which was a victory against a major mid western university and sent shock waves across the entire academic world in the USA”. The decree even goes under the name of the Rajender decree under which the judge agreed to her request that the university hire two women on the faculty that year. “Today there are 5-6 woman in that department and they had never had a woman in a hundred years. It has opened the doors for other departments all over the country and the university was asked to pay lost wages and promotions and other perks to women who had been discriminated against earlier.” An estimated 3,500 claimants have received almost $40 million in money damages from the university as a result of the decree.

The Triumph of Spirit

If Shyamala overcame academic adversity, Sakina (name changed), a lovely Pakistani woman, overcame adversity of another kind. Sakina who just turned 30, works in a large metropolitan city as a social worker, making a difference in the lives of people suffering abuse, mental disorders, HIV/AIDS and other problems. But behind the lovely confident exterior is a woman who grew up facing such intense physical abuse at the hands of her father that to this day she battles depression, that can make her non functional for days unless she takes medication. The oldest of four siblings, she saw her father physically and emotionally abusing her mother, indulging in extramarital affairs and when she tried to intervene receiving such a thrashing from him, right from the age of 4 years that the scars that remain are far deeper that physical.

She recalls, “There was physical abuse as long as I can remember about 4 and 5, and then there was the phase when I was 14-15 when mental health issues like depression and suicidal thoughts and desire for death were very rampant and I felt it was my only way out.”

Says Sakina, “When I discussed the abuse with family members and others, I would be told, oh your father loves you and this is how we discipline children. So there was always confusion about what was normal and what was not.”

Sakina finally told a counselor at school and was taken away from home and put in a residential school but the abuse would restart when she came home for the weekend.

By 25 Sakina was an emotional wreck, depressed and repressed, afraid to be in the same class with 10 kids. “Until I was 18, I was trying to stay alive,” says Sakina who tried to commit suicide around that time period, adding, “I felt proud that I finally managed to survive my 20s and now I’m living from day to day. The post traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression I have lived with are a constant reminder of what I have gone through.”

Sakina’s parents are now divorced and Sakina says it took her many years to finish college and her triumph has been to be medication free for a year, when she did not take anything for depression, choosing healthier personal relationships and “ to be able to talk before 30 people without second guessing myself and wondering fearfully whether what I was going to say was valid or worth saying.”

The Raman Rhapsody

He is a highly decorated math wizard who aced his way through IIT Bombay, and Cornell University and is a research scientist at IBM, California. The wildest thing he ever did was to go kayaking in the San Francisco bay! Dangerous for anyone but even more so for him because Dr. T.V Raman cannot see.

Dr Raman grew up in Pune the youngest child who was into math and puzzles. He had glaucoma at birth and became legally blind at 14. When he lost his vision his family tutored him at home rather than send him to a school for the blind. After finishing 10th grade he went to the national association for the blind in Bombay, learnt Braille and how to use the cane and then went to college.

When he joined IIT Bombay the professors were initially skeptical about how he would manage. Two weeks later they were all sufficiently impressed to willingly work with him. Soon after graduating Raman came to study at Cornell.

“In India I would be with friends and people would never realize that I could not see and the whole attitude would be very different, but the moment you walk with the cane the attitude changes and people start feeling sorry for you as if you are weaker than them in some way. It’s not so much the lack of facilities for the blind, but the social attitude that is the problem.”

Dr Raman says the thing that changed his life was getting a guide dog. “ When I came to Cornell, I had read about guide dogs. I was very comfortably running around campus with a cane and when the suggestion came for a guide dog I did not really feel it was a necessity to do this dog thing, plus I was scared of dogs.”

Raman went and met Hubble his first guide dog during a winter break. “There is a big difference walking with a cane and with a dog. It raises your confidence to another plateau.”

Dr Raman says that what he is happiest about is that on a day-to-day basis he does not think he can’t see. Hiring a blind scientist for work has been a non issue, he says. “If you work in research after graduating from Cornell people know you have been through a certain filter and that itself helps change the attitudes of people. During the interview process when I was running around interviewing for jobs , none of the questions pertaining to my blindness or if there was anything that could be done to facilitate my transition were directly asked of me. With my first job after I had interviewed and they had decided to make an offer to me they were a little worried and wanted to make sure that everyone in the lab was sensitized to having somebody in the lab that couldn’t see. They asked somebody to come and give a talk on attitude. It was in 1993 — the guy posted an article on the news board that I am going to give a talk about sensitizing people in my lab to a blind colleague and what shall I tell them? The funny thing was that the only person who saw the article was me and I responded to him that it was no big deal, just act normally.”

Dr Raman says in the United States despite such good facilities very few blind students seem to be pursuing math and science. “It’s something I have wondered about a lot and tried to understand. I think it’s a vicious circle — some of it is about a perception of what you can and cannot do and some of it is lack of education. I lucked out that I never went to a school for the blind and I have no idea what exposure they get, but I did not do anything that the blind children traditionally do, when they go to a school for the blind. My family was pragmatic and I never thought of myself as blind. when I lost my sight they made sure I knew how to overcome the handicap and then I went to a big college, Wadia College in Pune. Had I stayed in India I would not have been able to reach my full potential.”

Raman also says he has never had people take advantage of his blindness either in India or here. “I used to jump into any random auto rickshaw and go home in Poona and here I get off at any airport and take a cab and go to a hotel and no one has tried to rip me off. There is a little bit of conscience involved and also there is a realization that it is not an equal battle. Besides how much can anyone get away with anyways?”

Touched by AIDS

When you talk to Devan Nambiar, his mischievous and risque‘ sense of humor, his joie de vivre and his intelligence and positivism blow you away, and yet Devan is a gay man who has lived with being HIV/AIDS positive for more than a decade. Born in a South Indian family in Malaysia, Devan knew he was different from others, but discovered he was gay only after he came to Canada for further studies. Devan recalls that in the 1970s and then early to mid 1980s there was very little information about AIDS and safe sex was unheard of among men, leave alone gay men. In 1989 Devan met a man from United States and was in a relationship with him. A few months later he found out that his friend had been diagnosed with AIDS. “I was stunned. At that time I was doing some work with AIDS counseling and AIDS had started to be in the picture. You trust people and he knew he was HIV positive and never told me, but I too should have known better since I was doing counseling.”

Devan decided to take 6 months off to travel the world and then came back and took the AIDS test. “I was in denial and said to myself I am a good person. This will not happen to me. The test came back and I was told I was HIV positive. I walked out in a daze totally numb, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.”

In 1991, Devan fell in love with Christopher McCully, who was also HIV-positive. “For us, life was precious. In 1992, we traveled for 3 months across Asia. I began to see my world through his eyes. Chris got sick at the end of 1992. After his last doctor’s visit, he came home to me, slumped by the door and cried, ‘It is the beginning of the end, Devan.’ I will never forget the look on his face. In January 1993, I was at Chris’ bedside when he whispered to me, ‘I cannot fight this anymore.’ He was all skin and bones and yet, he had come to his peace, smiling and even joking with me before his death at the age of 27.”

That same year Devan’s father passed away. “I was wiped out emotionally, physically and spiritually,” says Devan. “My sister Gomathy and I took my father’s ashes to scatter them in the Ganges. I remember that time in India, sitting by the Himalayas, considering the magnitude of the mountains versus me. I questioned the significance of my own existence. I could disappear in this landscape, and no one would know I even existed. My personal tragedy was a drop in the ocean compared to the grandeur of the vision before me, but I realized that the impermanence of it all does not diminish the importance of my own life and what I can do with it. In fact, this impermanence makes an even stronger case for doing something to help.

Devan went to India in 1998 to work with people suffering from HIV/AIDS. It took him to Tambaram Hospital, in Chennai where he was horrified to see pigs roaming around and little children as young as five months afflicted with the disease.

“It made me feel guilty just to be alive. The face of a 12-year-old boy is stuck inside my mind. He said softly, ‘I know I am going to die soon.’ What do you get a child who has lost everything, including his parents, who is dying with a body ravaged by disease?

How do you measure a life’s worth?”

For several years Devan collected funds to give financial aid to patients, helped get a small facility built where the family of patients can stay and has been involved in clinical trials and research in allopathic and alternative medicine and feels that the cure for AIDS will come from the East.

Devan was recently given the Honor Roll award by the Ontario Aids Network, the only second South Asian to be honored for his work on HIV/AIDS related projects, and says he has survived because the mind is a powerful instrument and he believes that he will be here as long he needs to be here to do what he has to, to make a difference.

His final words are an inspiration in themselves. “I have come to know what it is like to watch helplessly when someone you love dies a slow death, yet thanking God for each extra moment in which to breathe deeply together and let go slowly. I have come to know the love of parents and their unconditional acceptance. I have come to know that no prayer is ever wasted and that our pain is universal. I have come to know that all of us have a meaningful purpose on this planet. When we open our hearts, we cannot deny what we feel. A smile means everything in life. Life is to be lived fully in every single breath, completely aware and with no regrets.”