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Here,
There, Everywhere an Indian |
By
Lavina Melwani |
Every
sixth person in the world is an Indian –
and suddenly we seem to be running into them all,
here in the United States.
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Nowadays,
it seems, you cannot turn a corner without
bumping into an Indian. Even on Mars!
As the world watched, the Mars Exploration
Rovers undertook detective work on the
red planet, guided by computer software
developed by a National Aeronautics
and Space Administration (NASA) team
lead by Kanna Rajan. And the team responsible
for the entry and landing of the twin
rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, is also
headed by an Indian American, Prasun
N. Desai.
Desai,
an aerospace engineer at NASA’s
Langley Research Center, Va, who led
the team which supported the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, explains:
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| Prasun Desai heads the team
responsible |
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the entry and landing on the twin
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“The
system that we contributed to was the
entry, descent and landing system for
MER, determining how we bring this Lander
safely down; It was just a completely
amazing experience — putting a system
like this together to make it successful
trying to land on another planet.”
Even as Indian Americans are an invisible
presence on Mars, their native land is
very much in the news with its own ambitious
space program, the outsourcing of millions
of jobs to India, the proliferation of
call centers, the booming export market
and an Indian presence in every field
from science to trade to literature to
cinema.
Every sixth person in this world is
an Indian — and sometimes, you feel
you’re meeting all of them at the
same time! Indeed, as home and the world
increasingly entwine in a global embrace,
Indians at home and Indians abroad are
all surfacing in different endeavors,
in many different fields.
Here in America, you seem to bump into
Indians in all walks of life and sometimes
in big clusters. Step into any inner city
hospital or managed health care center
— you may as well be in India, judging
by the number of Indian doctors, lab technicians
and nurses around.
Go into any Ivy League university or
urban community college and there are
bound to be Indians shaping the education
of the citizens of tomorrow, researching
in campus labs and writing new computer
programs. Hail a cab and you’re
likely to get a South Asian cabbie; stop
at a newsstand for a copy of the newspaper
or a bar of candy, and it most likely
will be handed to you by an Indian.
Whether it’s candy for the mouth
or food for thought, Indians are willing
and able to provide it. The Indians who
have emigrated to the far corners of the
world seem to be impacting their adopted
countries and you can hardly read a newspaper
or magazine without encountering Indian
names. Browse a newspaper at random and
you see that McKinsey and Company’s
senior partner Rajat Gupta has been elected
co-chairman of the United Nations Association
of the United States of America, a foreign
policy organization in Washington DC;
Neelum Arya, a California lawyer, has
just been selected as a Soros Fellow for
2004; and in South Africa, an Indian woman,
Ferial Haffajee, has been appointed editor
of a national weekly newspaper, The Mail
and Guardian. |
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| Surf channels
on TV and you might see Dr. Sanjay Gupta,
with his trademark smile, explaining medical
intricacies to Americans on CNN or Newsweek’s
Fareed Zakaria chatting about the state
of the world with Charlie Rose on Channel
13. While names like Ismail Merchant, M.Night
Shyamalan, Mira Nair and Gurinder Chadha
are well known in Hollywood, it’s
interesting how often you find Indian names
in the roll call of cast and crew, in all
sorts of support jobs.
Science and math have always been Indian
strong points and it is academic skills
that brought in the wave of Indian professionals
into the United Sattes, starting in the
60’s. There are thousands of academics
and scientists in American universities
and legions of physicians and nurses in
American hospitals.
The children of the immigrants who came
in the 60’s are growing up and making
their own mark in many different fields.
Mars is a long way from Bilimora, the small
town in Gujarat where Prasun Desai was born.
He came to the United States with his parents
in the early 70’s when he was just
six.
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| Jehangir Mehta
is pastry chef at |
Aix,
the populat Manhattan
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| He
grew up in New Jersey and did his masters
in Virginia and then stayed on to work at
NASA Langley.
Desai’s background
is in flight dynamics, but his role evolved
into a systems engineer lead, looking at
everything holistically and coming up with
solutions to make it all fit within the
budget and time frame.
He says, “The rover
is designed for 90 days to roam the surface,
but we hope it will last longer; it all
depends on the exact conditions on Mars
during that time frame so we’ll just
have to wait and see.”
Desai, 37, lives in Hampton,
Virginia and has been involved with the
MERS program since inception, about three
and a half years, supervising a team of
25. Asked if there are many Indians at NASA,
he says that while it’s obviously
not as prevalent as doctors or computer/electronic
engineers, it’s beginning to happen
at NASA too.
“Regarding contributions to space
exploration itself, this is the first mission
where we are able to drive away from where
we landed, and during those 90 days we will
be able to go to many different areas on
Mars and able to characterize different
areas,” he says. “So in essence
this mission is a lot of missions all in
one, and that from a scientific perspective
is definitely going to be very exciting,
trying to understand the conditions on Mars.
It’s been a truly amazing experience
for me.”
Does he see Indians making
a mark in America? He says, “In the
grand scheme of things I haven’t thought
about it too much but yes, it is amazing
how we as Indians are making great contributions
in so many different areas, not only in
the TV/movie industry, but in the business
world, electronics and now the space area
as well. So I guess our day is arriving
in terms of the world stage.” |
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The world,
of course, already knows about the technological
skills of Indians. Indeed, it is causing
much outsourcing angst in America as major
Red, Blue and White corporations take
their dollars and their jobs to India.
But Silicon Valley is still buzzing with
Indian names and there are plenty of desi
computer wizs right here who are doing
unusual things, such as Krishna Bharat,
who created that staple of Internet life,
Google News.
“The
2003 Webby Award winner for best news
site wasn’t dreamed up by marketers
looking for a way to extend the ubiquitous
Google brand,” writes Stacie D.
Kramer in Online Journalism Review:
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| Sujut Chawla stars in a one-hour
episode |
of reality
show Date Patrol.
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It started with one avid news consumer trying
to manage the flood of information in the
days after Sept. 11, 2001.”
The news portal has been
so successful that Google has added eight
international versions, including India,
Canada and France.
While most readers are
aware of the major success story of Indra
Nooyi, the president of PepsiCo, they may
not have heard about Padmasree Warrior,
Motorola’s new vice president and
chief technology officer.
Warrior shows how far Indian
Americans — especially women —
can go; she leads a global team of 4,600
technologists and guides creative research
at Motorola.
Warrior, who graduated from the Indian Institute
of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, went on
to receive a MS degree in chemical engineering
from Cornell University and has been with
Motorola since 1984. Her 20-year career
with Motorola in the U.S. started in Arizona,
and has taken her to Texas and now Illinois.
She has served on the Texas
Governor’s Council for Digital Economy,
and is a member of the Texas Higher Education
Board Review panel. She was one of six women
nationwide selected to receive the ëWomen
Elevating Science and Technology’
award from Working Woman magazine in 2001.
She says: “Motorola
is a very diverse and global company. So
although I have been based in U.S. cities
for my jobs, I travel extensively and manage
teams worldwide. I travel often to India
on business and Motorola’s software
operations in India report to me.”
Does she see many more Indian women getting
into technology and science? “Absolutely,”
she says. “ There are many competent
Indian women leaders in science and technology
both in the industry and in academia.”
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Making a
difference offers the greatest satisfaction
in her high profile job: “When some
things change for the better because of
what I started as a leader, it gives me
a tremendous amount of pride. It could
be changing the culture in an organization,
creating a strong team environment or
introducing a new technology.”
Warrior
grew up in Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh,
in a family that was very close and nurturing,
but also gave great importance to education:
“I would say there was an added
emphasis on science and math, because
most of the extended family members were
either engineers or science majors. I
suppose that was the underpinning for
my interest in science.”
Indians
seem to be succeeding in so many diverse
fields now from technology to politics,
films to literature. What are her thoughts
on this sudden success of Indians?
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| Naresh Jessani
co-owns the Dog |
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“I don’t think it is a “sudden
success,’” she says. “I
think it is more a matter of reaching critical
mass to gain global recognition. In other
words, now there are a number of Indians
in positions of influence in many fields
that have more of a global reach than say,
ten years ago.”
And this critical mass
is crucial: even as the Indian American
population has burgeoned to almost 2 million,
you see that ambitious drive in so many
aspiring youngsters too.
You have Indian names bouncing
off the walls in any Spelling Bee or nationwide
Science contest or lists of Rhodes Scholars.
Sometimes the Indian presence
is invisible, such as in the 2003 Mathcounts
National Championship, where the winning
team of four students — all non-Indians
— was coached to victory by an Indian
American woman, Pallavi Shah.
Shah, along with her co-coach Mary Fay-Zenk
led these students to their big win in a
national contest among 57 teams. She teaches
mathematics to seventh and eighth graders
at Miller Middle School in San Jose, and
trains 7th and 8th graders for math competitions
organized by Mathcounts.
Indian Americans seem to
have a finger in every pie, from Mars to
Mass Transit. Yes, there are hundreds of
Indians in New York’s bustling mass
transit system, from engineers and programmers
to token booth clerks. |
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Although
Senator Hillary Clinton was quite mistaken
when she identified Mahatma Gandhi as
running a gas station in Atlanta, Indian-Americans
are the many cogs in the wheels that make
America move: they get your cars to run,
fix you when you are sick, truck your
merchandise, work in construction, sell
you your house, interpret your test results
in laboratories, check out your groceries
and sell you your beer. They have embraced
all jobs in their quest of the American
Dream.
And now
the last bastion — political power
— also seems within reach. Although
Dilip Singh Saund has been the first and
only Indian American congressman, there
are many working towards emulating his
example. Political action committees have
proliferated and the number of Indian-Americans
standing for political office has grown,
and in Bobby Jindal’s hard-fought
campaign, an Indian American almost made
it to the Governor’s mansion in
Louisiana.
Several
Indian Americans have had successful bids
for political office including Kumar Barve
who won his bid for the Maryland House
of Delegates and Satveer Chaudhary who
won a seat in the Minnesota State Senate.
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| Iowa House |
| Representative
Swati |
| Dandekar, so-chaired
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Iowa |
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Indian
Americans are finally standing for public
office, be it on school boards, town and
city councils or more visible political
offices.
Meet Iowa House Representative
Swati Dandekar, the dynamic first term legislator
and the co-chair of Senator John Kerry’s
campaign for the presidential nomination.
She is responsible to some degree for his
stellar showing in the Iowa Caucuses, relentlessly
spreading the word amongst Iowans, especially
women.
She says, “ I talked
to women all over Iowa and told them why
I was supporting Kerry and I was able to
convince them that he is the right candidate
to be the next president of the United States.”
Dandekar has been working on education and
economic development and serves on the Appropriations
Committee that gives funding to all the
departments, as well as on the International
Relations Committee.
Unassuming and accessible and quite Iowan
in her ways, Dandekar had never planned
to be in politics. As a newcomer to America,
she had wanted to learn more about the country
and connect with her neighbors, and so got
involved in volunteer work, teaching elementary
level school children. When the school district
found out that she had a degree in chemistry
and biology, they asked her to tutor high
school students. |
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She believes
that people usually enter political office
driven by a need to make an important
change. This happened with her, when as
a mother of two junior high school students,
she found the school board was implementing
a program that was watering down the curriculum.
Although
she was just one person, she decided to
speak up and did. She says, “It
never occurred to me that I’m Indian
American, how will people react when I
said I don’t like this program,
I found out that not only I didn’t
like it, but there were lots of people
who were in the same boat and they supported
me when I went in front of the school
board, they were there in numbers.”
The result was that she managed to get
the decision overturned. She says, “When
you do something like that you realize
that one person can change the course,
with the help of the community of course.”
After that, she stood for the school board
elections, and won by a landslide.
Her organizational
and problem solving skills attracted the
attention of Dick Meyers, the Democratic
Party leader, who asked her to run for
political office.
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| Motorola’s
Padmashree |
| Warrior: Reaching
critical |
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became the first South Asian woman to win
in a district that is 99.99 percent white
American, winning with 59 percent of the
vote. She says, “When you see how
I won, it says a lot about my district and
says a lot about Iowa.”
How does she perceive the
Indian American success story? “ I’m
very excited. As Indian Americans, I think
we’ve done a great job of becoming
a part of mainstream America and not forgotten
our heritage and culture.
I think we are very comfortable
with it, and once you’re comfortable
with your culture and you’re proud
of your heritage, it’s very easy to
mainstream. One can always improve but I
think we are getting there and we are doing
it.”
Indeed Indians are turning up in the most
unusual places, in jobs which have nothing
to do with their South Asian heritage or
culture. What could be more red, white and
blue than Ford? And yes, there’s an
Indian behind that 100-year-old company
too. Ford Motor Company researcher Haren
Gandhi is the highest-ranking scientist/engineer
at Ford and was awarded the 2002 National
Medal of Technology by President Bush.
The citation for Dr. Gandhi
commended his leadership in the automotive
industry in ensuring the judicious use of
precious metals and conservation measures.
He is credited with pioneering research
and has more than 40 U.S. patents in automotive
engineering. If you’ve driven a Ford
lately, you certainly have him to thank
for the great ride.
While Indians have been
making an impact on serious disciplines
such as science, medicine and technology,
what is life without some fun, a big helping
of dessert and a Dog Spa!
Jehangir Mehta, who hails
from Bombay, is the pastry chef at Aix,
the popular Manhattan restaurant that showcases
the cuisine of French chef Dider Virot.
Mehta’s innovative desserts are deliciously
revolutionary, pressing spices, spring flowers
and even green tomatoes into service, creating
new taste sensations.
Yes, Mehta might be Indian but there’s
not a gulab jamun in sight as he concocts
unusual endings, which become the talk of
diners and food critics. As Moira Hodgson
of the New York Observer wrote, “One
of the most daring and original pastry chefs
I have come across in New York. His creations
are unexpected but with coherence and personality.”
Mehta, who did a four-year course in hotel
management in Bombay, earned his chef’s
toque at the Culinary Institute of America.
He’s been a pastry chef at some of
the top restaurants in New York, including
Jean Georges, Union Pacific, Virot, Compass
and now, Aix. He also creates gourmet handmade
chocolates, fresh flower wedding cakes and
teas at Partistry, his online confectionery.
A French pastry chef who’s Indian
— now we’ve seen it all!
Spas may be all the rage now for Americans,
but a dog spa? Naresh Jessani is the co-owner
of New York Dog Spa and Hotel in trendy
Chelsea, a streamlined 8000 sq. foot establishment
for the dog in your life, offering all amenities
like boarding, daycare and vet care as well
as a boutique, massage therapy and manicures
for canines. Jessani just opened a second
location and the stores are a multimillion-dollar
business.
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So how did an
Indian get into the pet business? Jessani, who
was born in London, laughs: “When we started,
it was something pretty unusual for anyone to
be doing, leave alone Indians! I don’t
think Indian culture is dog oriented though
the British culture is. It’s said the
British are warmer to their pets than to their
children. But Indian culture isn’t anti-dog
and we do see a lot of Indian clients.”
His engineer father
moved the family to New Jersey in 1970, and
Jessani studied at Rutgers before becoming a
management consultant. Wanting to test his wings
as an entrepreneur, he and his partners decided
to research the pet market thoroughly.
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| Pallavi Shah and the
winning Mathcount |
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found that with more and more couples delaying
marrying and having children later, pets become
a surrogate family and people want to do right
by them. He says, “Day care is very popular
with young professionals as it’s a very
convenient service.”
Jessani compares his Dog Spa
to a Marriott — consistent and comfortable
and within reach of most clients, though it gets
its share of upscale clients who insist their
dogs be given Evian to drink! They also do makeovers
for dogs; recently the popular TV show Queer Eye
for the Straight Guy was doing a makeover for
a guy and brought in his dog to Dog Spa for a
beauty treatment too.
So how does Jessani view the
diversity of Indian professions? He says, “In
the beginning when we first moved here, all the
Indians were academics, doctors and engineers
because that’s all they allowed in the country.
And then immigration laws changed and then you
had the stereotypes of Indians as a hotel owner
or a gas station owner.
“Now I see Indians everywhere,
in construction, plumbing, air-conditioning work.
I’ve been here since 1970, and I think Indians
are almost completely assimilated into the American
culture after one generation of children. Everything
is changed. I think in 30 years Indians will be
in everything.” Talking of offbeat choices,
you now have an Indian American guy starring in
a full one-hour episode of a hit reality show
on national cable TV this fall. Sujit Chawla,
a filmmaker, decided to let the cable network
find him a girl friend and starred in this real
life event on an episode of “Date Patrol”
on The Learning Channel (TLC).
Turning his life into an open
book, the show turns him into the center of attraction
for a full hour, helping to remake him to land
the perfect date. Chawla, who graduated from law
school, was working in the legal department of
a hospital in Connecticut. He had also worked
on the filming of American Desi and recently decided
to become a full-time filmmaker. He sent in his
application to Date Patrol on a lark and was surprised
to get an immediate call from the producers, asking
if they could come over the next day and video
tape him.
They did and a week later they
told him he was on the show. In the show, they
take Chawla, who is based in Manhattan, and let
the experts improve his dating skills and appearance.
By the end of the episode he is supposed to be
a new man and go out and find his own dates. The
program blurb put it this way: “30 years
old and unemployed, Sujit hasn’t had a date
in five years and spends most of his day in front
of the computer or TV. The Date Patrol’s
mission: to get Sujit out of his apartment and
confidently meeting women.”
Laughs Chawla, “I wasn’t
really happy with the way they put it, but technically
I suppose it’s not incorrect! I suppose
it looks better to make it sound as bad as possible
and then see the transformation at the end. You
have strangers telling you what you’re doing
wrong and cameras following you around all the
time but it was fun.”
For years and years, it was hard
to find an Asian face on mainstream television
but now it’s certainly starting to happen,
and Indians are getting a piece of the pop culture
pie. As Chawla points out, there are scores of
reality shows from the big ones like Survivor
to small ones like Blind Date, and none of them
have ever had Indians in them.
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“I think
the folks at Date Patrol were looking for something
outside of the ordinary, a little more colorful
than normal,” says Chawla. “ I think
reality TV is starting to come to the understanding
that Indians are a large part of the American
population and their stories are like everyone
else’s but at the same time they are also
a little bit different, so perhaps more people
will be interested in seeing it.”
An Indian starring
in a reality show! Now, in America’s way
of evaluating things that means we’ve
really arrived! For young Indian American kids,
seeing faces like their own on fun shows and
in popular culture makes them feel they do belong.
But never too
far from India. Prasun Desai, after spending
months of nonstop, around the clock work on
the successful expedition to Mars, is now looking
for a nice, long break.
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| Ford Motor Company’s
Haren Gandhi |
| receiving the 2002 National
Medal of |
| Technology from George
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He
says: “I actually don’t want to think
for a while so I’m planning to go back to
India and go to the family farm and just pick
mangoes for a while — and not think!”
From Mars to the mango groves of Gujarat, the
journeys continue.
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