After I graduated, I accepted a job at Batliboi at Rs 750 per month instead of Telco, Bombay as I didn’t want to work there. I did very well at Batliboi where I was posted to Calcutta after training in Udhana, Gujarat. I travelled by plane to cities from Tinsukhia to Madras and up to Raipur and Jabalpur in the west. I was living a luxurious life on company and customer expenses. My customers were mostly for machinery in ordinance factories, heavy machinery industry and tea gardens in the Northeast. The brother of Ms. Sahawney, our Eastern Region’s secretary, was head of all Indian Ordinance factories in Delhi and so we had very high-level contacts in each factory. Unfortunately, I was getting tired of this fast-paced party life and was traveling almost 15-20 days a month. I knew I could not live like that after getting married and wanted to get back to the Engineering or R&D side.
My brother had immigrated to US in 1971 during the Arab Oil Embargo and had survived. So, in 1976 I started applying for US immigration for Southern Illinois region around Peoria. To my surprise, sitting in India and after trying for just 6 months, I got a job offer from John Deere, as well as labor clearance, based on my IIT qualifications and fluidics research plus my training in Batliboi in design and manufacture of machine tools. The job didn’t have any requirements to stay on for a fixed period after joining them. I guess there was a shortage of people with Mechanical Engineering job experience there.
When I left Batliboi in 1977, I was making Rs. 2100 a month and single. I got married in July and Meera’s immigration clearance also came through. We reached Peoria just before winter started in 1977. While we were lucky to land in the US, Peoria was one of the coldest places, a small town with cold winds howling through the surrounding corn fields. It was a phenomenal change from the India we left behind.
Well, it was our first winter and as luck would have it, the weather changed for the worse and it started snowing hard. That year they had an historic event that dumped 20” of snow every day for 4-5 days. The whole town was closed, and nothing was moving. We were advised to stay home.
Luckily my brother had been in Florida since 1971. Since most of Peoria was closed, we decided to visit him. In those days, Ozark Airlines flew from Peoria to Tampa directly for snowbirds. Through this storm the airport was still open. We managed to get there somehow, getting delivered in a truck! We left for a few days of reprieve from the historic snow event. When we left it was below freezing in Peoria and 80 degrees F in Tampa when we landed.
After a couple of days in Florida, we thought hard and decided to ditch the horrible life in Illinois and I resigned. Felt that I ditched John Deere but it was not proper to suffer that hard culturally and weather wise in the middle of nowhere.
We did not have many worldly possessions then. Meera was the first one to get a job at a hospital with her training in Biochemistry at Haffkine. She did not have a license, but they hired her as there was a staff shortage and helped her get a license in 6 months.
I was without a job and looking to start something. In December 1977, saw an ad from Pall in the local newspaper. Pall was a startup then with exposure to aerospace fluid manifolds and filters. They had moved operations from Long Island, NY to the Clearwater area in Florida. I was lucky to get a job offer from them and started on February 6, 1978, and stayed on in the Tampa Bay area. It was the Old South in Florida then and I was the only colored person in an all-white staff. They used to call me the “colored engineer”.
However, over the next couple of years I got a reputation for solving problems. So, the floor told management in surveys that “colored engineer” always solves problems. I was hired at a lower salary that was used for “coloreds” at Pall. However, to my amazement I was promoted to group leader in ’81, my salary doubled, and I had 14 white staff reporting to me. That is where I further developed my coping mechanisms in human relations by being friendly and forgetting the way they treated me before. I joined these red necks for lunch, weekend fishing, beer escapades and football. I was accepted as one of them over the next 3-6 months.
The same folks helped me build my first house. I could not have done it without them. We had only 24 to 25 families from India of all religions, regions and languages scattered all over large area. So, our kids grew up with southern whites. We had no Indian store or temple or Indian church here. However, in the last 47 years, we have every Indian grocery store out of NY and about 15 temples catering to every region of India from South to North!! We have over 10,000 families and more and more are coming.
After Pall’s success in Aerospace, Dr. Pall developed a Blood purification filter to remove pathogens, which was the major cause of death after blood transfusions. His wife had died due to a blood transfusion infection. By the mid ‘80s I had developed a reputation in the company for taking ideas and turning them into products. I used to be involved right from development, design, manufacturing, qualification to strategy for customer presentations. Over the next 10 to 15 years, Pall expanded to almost every sector of the economy, except finance, and became a Fortune 500 company. With that, I was blessed to expand my wings globally into R&D and product development in various sectors besides aerospace.
Pall stock when I joined was around $2-3 in 1978. After splitting 6 to 7 times, Pall was sold to Danaher in 2014 for $127. Long-term employees with yearly stock options did very well. I was with Pall for 39 years and retired in 2017 and started consulting to keep me mentally challenged.
My case is very rare as folks do not stay with the same firm for more than 4 to 5 years. However, I had ideal conditions for growth and had no reason to leave. Pall also paid and supported my educational escapades for getting an MBA and an MS. In addition, being in Florida I developed an interest in Florida real estate. That has served me well over the years.
Overall, I faced several political, racial, and professional challenges in life but was blessed to have learned coping mechanisms in Durgapur, IITB and the Batliboi job in Calcutta that taught me how to succeed in face of adversities. It taught me to overcome the fear of failure and to develop a positive and cheerful attitude that was crucial in giving you confidence when facing adversities. Finally, always felt that someone higher is always behind me in my endeavors!
IIT Bombay 1974 Reunion 