Aravind's Personal Blog

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: ...

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...

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...

( 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...

F orty years is an important milestone, more so for immigrants forever trying to make a home far away from home (as if it still is). For some, like me, it is not just a milestone but a transition point, from young to old, and an apt moment to reflect on the life and times that went past. As the saying goes, “ it is not the destination that is important but the people we meet and the lessons we learn ”, I had the opportunity to meet several and learned a lot in these forty years. I am greatly thankful for the opportunities life offered. Research at Einstein: Following my arrival in the summer of 1980 at the AECOM , it became our home for 17 productive and enjoyable years. Einstein offered me the opportunity to indulge in various scientific pursuits and also gave Jaya the chance to work. Those were the exciting times for biomedical research and grants were less competitive. We met several people, made friends and acquaintances in the research community and in the neighborhood. Snow, rai...

  [My father, who died in 1998, would have been 93 years this month. This piece written five years after his death is being republished here.]   Twenty-three years ago, soon after I landed in New York to continue my research career, I visited the resident audiologist in the hospital affiliated to the college I had just started to work in.  I was looking for a better hearing aid that would improve my hearing.  The revelation of the baffled audiologist still rings in my ears - if I grew up in the US as a boy, with the degree of hearing loss that I had suffered, I would have been put in a special school for the hearing impaired (sign language school).  I explained to the audiologist, and to other hearing professionals who examined me since, as well as to some inquisitive parents of hearing-impaired children, that I had achieved my level of communication due to the efforts of one person – my father . Back in India in the early sixties, an antibiotic overdose reduce...