I grew up in South Bombay and spent my childhood & teenage years in a flat overlooking the Arabian Sea. Now in my sunset years, I live in a high-rise condo looking out to the Atlantic Ocean in the beautiful city of Boston. As I look back on my life and experiences, it is the training and friendships at IIT and the places I have lived that have endured. That has made me who I am. And today the overwhelming emotions are those of gratitude and luck.
Gratitude for my loving family – my wife Rita and our two sons Ashwin and Sameer. Gratitude for the analytical skills and learning from my electrical engineering days that stood me in good stead in my business school and years at work. Gratitude for the professional opportunities that allowed me to live comfortably and be able to give back to every community we lived in. Gratitude to friends from St. Xavier’s, IIT, Hostels 2 & 8, South Carolina and New England. All those have stood by me, offered guidance, and help whenever I needed it – asked and unasked!
Serendipity has also been an accompanying gift in my life. My dad had just passed when I graduated IIT, and I found a nice job at TCS in 1974. But a dear class friend from IIT who had joined Cornell kept writing to me “you should be here in the States” and kept sending me information from innovative business programs there. The school gave me both admission and aid. Lady Luck then charted a career for me in international business and onto even creating a startup for Fidelity’s operations in India. Serendipity took me into local American politics allowing me to break new ground as one of the earliest immigrant South Asians elected to political office.
And now, thanks to our curiosity and desire to learn, my wife and I travel all over the globe in our retirement. That still holds me in gratitude about our lives and good fortune. In the first convocation address in 1956 at the first IIT in Kharagpur, India’s pioneering visionary Jawaharlal Nehru said, “Here in the place of that Hijli Detention Camp stands the fine monument of India, representing India’s urges, India’s future in the making.” What a gift to India, the world and to me – a child of Sindhi refugees of the Partition.
IIT Bombay 1974 Reunion 