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A Tribute – In Memory of Professor Subhash Karampuri

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It is with profound sadness that we note the sudden passing of our dear friend Subhash, following heart complications. We were very close to Subhash and his family from the time we first met them in 1976 at the newly established Kakatiya University (KU) in Warangal, India. While we were in different departments at KU—Subhash in Botany, Aravind in Physics, Najmuddin and John in Economics—we became very close friends and shared a strong bond. On campus, we were inseparable and known as the ‘Gang of Four’. Our friendship extended beyond the campus, and we became very close to Subhash’s family, spending many evenings and weekends at his house. His family became our family in Warangal, as the three of us were then bachelors. We enjoyed the warm hospitality and delicious cooking of Shashi, and the affection of his young sons, Sujai and Sushil, who would sit on our laps and hug us. Our friendship with Subhash did not end when the three of us went to the USA in the early 1980s. B
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5 Things I Learned From A Mentor

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I was in my mid-20s when I joined AECOM in the summer of 1980 as a postdoc after graduating from a university in south India. Being in my prime youth, I was ready and willing to consume new ideas for personal growth; in other words, I was looking for true, informal mentors. My philosophy then (and now) was like in Maya Angelou’s famous poem : "Nobody, but nobody can make it out here alone."    At AECOM, my primary mentor and associate was Jag G., who was more than ten years my senior. Jag is a very simple man with certain idolizable qualities. Among the many things I learned from Jag, five stand distinctly (with descriptions mine):  You win/gain some, you lose some : Don’t expect to win over every issue or gain in each event. Not every situation, event, or issue is favorable to you. As exciting and fulfilling a win or a gain would be, be prepared to lose. Feeling like a sore loser doesn’t do any good. Take defeat graciously and move on. Always try to do 10% better:  In lif
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Letting Her Go

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Few weeks ago I was in the emergency room in the local hospital for a minor ailment. While waiting to be hauled for a CT scan, I overheard a nearby patient give his year of birth to the nurse. It was 1935, the same year my mother was born. For a few moments I was glad and then sad; glad, because someone purportedly of my mother's age is still living, sad because my mother is not. Of course, it is a known fact that the average life expectancy in India is about a decade lower than that in the US (69.7 versus 78.9 years, to be exact ). My mother died on Feb 26, 2013, in the ICU of a hospital in our hometown in India, two-and-half hours after I reached her bedside. About fifty hours earlier, she called me as she was getting ready to be transported to the hospital by ambulance. All she could say was that she was having shortness of breath and waiting to be rushed to the hospital. I did not realize at that time that it was meant to be our last conversation. In the summer of 2010, Atul G
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Guardian Angels

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Everyone has Guardian Angels in their life at one time or the other; I have been lucky enough to have them for most of the time. Apart from parents, siblings, and cousins, they are the ones to look out for you in times of trouble and be your guide in life’s journey. Most of the time the angels' roles are filled by the closest of friends and associates. Earlier I wrote about my two friends who guided me in my transition to adult life during my university days ( here , here , and here ). This one is about an earlier phase in my life, in my childhood and teenage life when my three buddies were the defacto Guardian Angels in elementary, middle, and high school and college undergrad studies. Bheem, Jan, and I have been close friends since elementary school. Ram joined Jan and me in college. I had a whole bunch of other friends during my student days but these three were way special. Even after 60 years, we continue to be in touch and chat very often. Bheem (short for Bheemanna) is the
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The House My Father Built

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Soon after my parents got married on the second day of 1951, my father built a small house in our ancestral village in a south Indian state. The one-bedroom dwelling with a mini-courtyard (actually two, in both front and back) and an open kitchen was built in a corner of my paternal grandfather’s property. In those days that house stood like a laser among candles. Ironically, my parents never lived in that house. I suspect the decision to informally abandon that house was partly the result of the time my parents spent on a long vacation that followed their wedding. It was sort of an extended honeymoon, for several months in New Delhi, the nation’s capital, more than 1150 miles north of our village. India just became a Republic a year before and what followed was a mass exodus of people from the educated south to the capital city in the north seeking suitable employments in the several newly created government departments. I recall my parents telling us that they stayed in Karol Bagh, a
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In Search of a Cochlear Implant and Beyond

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I had my cochlear implant (CI) on the right ear exactly 15 years ago last month. It has been a very productive and gratifying journey, restoring, I would say, more than 75% of hearing in my right ear; much more than I expected. I first learned about CI in 1984 through an article in the New York Times on March 27th. That morning my associate and research mentor, Jag Gulati, spotted the NYTimes article and passed it to me. By noon, excited by the prospect of the new procedure, our senior mentor and the famous cardiologist, Ed Sonnenblick called the CI surgeon at the NYU Bellevue Hospital who apparently performed the first surgery there to enquire the suitability of me having the CI. As the CI surgeon explained, the procedure was still in its infancy, and told my mentor that if I can respond to a “hello” then I was not a candidate. This was the scenario in mid-1980s. During the next quarter-century, CI hardware evolved from a body-worn crude device to a most sophisticated programmable mu
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Where Angels Tread

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( dedicated to the numerous nieces and grandnieces on the International Women's day, 2021 ) My parents loved girls. They didn’t have daughters of their own but they treated and considered a whole bunch of girls their own. Since my mother’s seventh death anniversary last month, I was thinking what my parents' best trait was - They loved kids in general but girls were very special to them. They were married 70 years ago and spent most of their married life as migrants in a distant place away from their relatives. Although very closely acquainted with the numerous nieces, my parents missed the day-to-day interactions with them. My parents made several friends, many of them families with girls, and considered those girls their own. My parents believed that girls bring a great amount of sanity and good fortune to the household. As much as they loved their sons, my parents felt that angels do not tread around the house without daughters. This was a special trait in the highly patriar
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