“Look Mama A Geine “And Other Tales from the Life of Avi B

I did my first degree in Commerce at Panjab University. We were a group of four Sikhs, three from St. Johns in Chandigarh and one from Sanawar who always hung around together. We all talked about going to America.

I applied to a few schools in the United States for my MBA and got accepted at Southern Methodist University (SMU)in Dallas. Its recent claim to fame being the place where George W Bush’s Presidential Library is housed. After the excitement of getting the acceptance wore down, I started to have doubts. Should I go or not? It was a lot of money. What if I did not do well? What if I could not get a job and so on. My Mother who was a strong woman, sat me down and said “You should go. Otherwise, you will regret it all your life “.

So late August 1972, wearing a marooned coloured turban, a newly tailored pin stripe suit, from Purba Tailors of Sector 7-C, and carrying a briefcase, I boarded an Air India flight to New York. I was seated next to a young American girl. She was part of a group of students from the University of Rochester who had come for a holiday. We chatted. I asked her about her visit. She mentioned that before coming, the gossip among the friend was that the Indians were generally deferential to the Whites and you could bully them and be rude to them, however to be careful about doing that to the Sikhs as they would not take any crap.

I reached Dallas late in the evening and took a bus to downtown and checked into a cheap hotel. Next morning around nine, the confident fresh off the boat (or plane) sardar walked out and saw a dinner across the street. Walked in to a “How you doing?” greeting which was ignored as I didn’t realize it was welcoming me. I sat on the counter and confidently ordered a burger and coffee – for breakfast. Took a bite and almost threw up. Never having had a burger before, I did not realize that apart from the meat and bread, there would be onions, tomatoes, mustard and ketchup. Then took a sip of coffee. Being used to the instant coffee and hand beaten espresso coffee, this bitter black coffee was awful. Paid and took a bus to SMU.

SMU is an urban campus and quite spread out. I decided to stay on campus and got allotted a room in the Theology Graduate Dorm. Next day stepped out to go for breakfast. As I started walking a blonde girl walked by smiled looked at me and said “Hi, how you doing?” I straightened up and looked around to see if she had said that to me or someone else. Another few steps and the same thing happened. I was a bit confused. Was there something about me which attracted these girls? After half a day or so I began to realize that it was the Texan way of greeting - strangers’ and friends.

Next morning, I found my way to the cafeteria. Hundreds of students all piling up their plates with food. What caught my attention was some big guys both Whites and African American, their trays full of food and two or three glasses of milk. Reminded me of the big sardars at the desi halwai’s knocking of their tall steel glasses of milk. But those guys were no match for these football players.

That weekend some senior Indians who had been there a while rounded up the Indian newbie’s and took them shopping. Walked into a mall where JC Penny was the anchor. Since this was the first time in a department store and I looked around with wide eyes at the variety of stuff on display. Being of small build and not realizing that I was in Texas, I went to the men's section, but because of my size, I was directed to the boy’s section. Bought a few drip-dry shirts, same print, different colours and of course a long-desired pair of Levi blue jeans. Next day decided to wear my blue jeans. I had great difficulty walking, as it was so stiff. Had to wash it at least half a dozen times to be able to wear it.

After a while got a part time job in the books and records section of an upper middle class department store in the books and records section which was housed in the basement next to an escalator. Of course, my turban would get discrete glances. One day saw a young boy coming the escalator holding his mothers’ hand noticed me. Pulling her hand, he said loudly “Look Mama there is a genie “. She tried to hush him up and then dragged him away.

Being always interested in books I very quickly became familiar with what we had and what was selling well. One of the books which was on the best seller list then was Dr. Atkins Diet Revolution. Whenever a woman would come to the counter and before she could say anything, I would hand her a copy of Dr. Atkins. “How did you know?” I would just smile enigmatically and not say a word.

One of the sales ladies was a nice old lady in her fifties offered to give me her old car when she heard that I was next going to a school in Phoenix, which I declined. One weekend while walking around the mall at lunch time, I ran into another bearded, turbaned sardar. He was actually from Chandigarh and we had known each other slightly. Sat down to have lunch. He told me that he was driving around rural Texas selling bibles door to door. Try picturing a sardar ringing the doorbell of a house in Luckenbach, Texas trying to sell a bible to the housewife who answered the door. Apparently, he was a good sales man and was doing pretty well.

Another day it was late afternoon and I was walking in downtown Dallas doing a survey for my Marketing Professor and I heard a shout from behind me. There were two big African Americans. “Where are you from man? Are you a A rab? I said “No, I am from India”. Then one of them said “Give me five dollars “I said “No “, turned around and started walking. After a few steps I turned around and saw one of them looking a bit confused and the other bent over laughing. Fortunately, I was not in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles where the ending might have been slightly different.

While in Dallas I would see the Texans walking around in bleeding Madras shorts and jackets which were very popular then. Before heading out to Phoenix I decided I had to have a bleeding Madras sports jacket. I don’t know what had gotten into me. Neiman Marcus was having a sale and I splurged on a jacket. It lay in my cupboard as I moved to Hong Kong and Singapore and back to Hong Kong. Eventually I gave it away, never having worn it even a single time.

The Thunderbird Graduate School of International Management was a very different type of school compared to SMU. It was housed in a former air field and some of the dorms were in the old barracks. It had the largest number of foreign students among all the schools in the United States. It was a popular recruitment stop for the multinationals, particularly those with operations in Asia. It is now part of Arizona State University.

I decided to stay off campus sharing a house with a couple and another single guy. It was an interesting experience. We went to the Goodwill store and furnished the place for under twenty dollars. One of the roommates was perpetually stoned, even while attending classes.

At school there were a few laid back hippie types with whom I got along. One of them had a long beard, wore flip flops, a bag slung over his shoulder and a stray dog by his side. During classes the dog would sit outside the class. Not sure what they were doing in a business school? They were serious fans of The Grateful Dead. One weekend we decided to go to a Grateful Dead concert at a stadium at Phoenix. It was one the coldest days in Phoenix for the last twenty years. However, it did not stop the Deadheads from stripping and running around naked totally stoned or blown.

After graduating from Thunderbird, I went to Los Angeles to look for a job. I bought an eighteen-month-old Volkswagen from the official dealer. Drove once from Los Angeles to San Francisco. On the way back had some trouble with the car. A few months later I decided to drive to New York as my sister had come to get some medical treatment for her son.

It was fall 1974. Accompanying me part of the way was a German couple. We drove from Los Angeles to Phoenix. We spent the night with a friend who was still at Thunderbird. Early next morning she went off to classes. We packed up our bags and were loading them into the car when two police cars drove up and the cops jumped with drawn guns. We identified ourselves and gave the name of our host. Apparently, the neighbours had reported that some foreigners and hippies (the German had long hair) were stealing from the house. The police checked with my friend and everything was settled.

We drove off to the Grand Canyon and spent the night there. Next morning, we started off early and decided that we would take turns as I wanted to get to New York as soon as I could. The Germans were getting off somewhere near Memphis. However, we started having trouble with the car. The engine started heating and the oil was bubbling over. Every few hundred miles I had to pour in a quart of engine oil. After dropping off my friends I stopped to get some gas. The car refused to start. It was late in the evening and next day was a Sunday and the earliest I could get it fixed was Monday. I spent the night at a motel close by.

Next morning, I decided to try starting the engine and to my surprise it worked. I drove for the next thirty-six hours with a few hours stop in DC and frequent cups of coffee (I had gotten used to it). I reached the New Jersey turnpike late evening. It was the end of a long week end and the traffic was a mess. I prayed that my car would not break down. Luck was on my side. I reached our friends house in Chappaqua in upstate New York late in the evening. The friends my sister and I were staying with came to our wedding as well as Simran and Priya’s. Some of you might remember meeting them – Steve and Maddy Gunders.

In January I was informed that I had a job offer from Citibank in Hong Kong. Landed up there in February 1975 after attending my elder brother’s wedding in Chandigarh.

After about three years, I decided to go on a holiday to Europe taking the Euro rail as it was known then. I was visiting Amsterdam, Rome, Zurich, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Oslo. Don’t remember the exact route I took. While in Rome, I decided to visit Venice by train. At the station in Rome was wandering around when t a sardar wearing a baseball cap came up to me and started asking “Kithu aye ho? (where are you from?). I told him and asked him what was he doing here. He said Mei kya sare England ja re. Italy koi ne ja ren te meh ticket la eke agia . (everybody was going to England so I decided to come to Italy. I bought a one-way ticket). But after a few days he was running out of money and was unable to get a job. He had met some Pakistani’s who told him that it was easy to get jobs in Austria and they had some friends who would help him, so he was leaving that night. Wished him good luck and went off to Venice. A few days later I returned to Rome and saw the same person wandering around. I asked him what happened? Apparently, he got sent back from the border since he did not have an Austrian visa. He now only had about five or ten dollars. I told him to go to the Indian embassy and asked them to send him back. That was out of the question for him. He asked me where I was going next? I said Zurich. He asked if the train went via Munich. I said yes and he said “take me along till Munich “I asked him if knew anyone in Munich? He said he had a cousin. I asked him if he had his address? He replied vaguely that he lived near the YMCA or something. I declined to travel with him, but gave him enough money to buy a ticket to Munich. He took down my Chandigarh address and promised to send me the money. I never heard from him. I wonder if he was one of the first of the forty thousand Sikhs who landed up Northern Italy and helped solve the shortage of dairy farmers and saved the Italian Parmesan industry.

(https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33149580).

 

Continuing my trip, I was in Stockholm walking down the street late one evening and I heard a shout in Punjabi. I turned around and there was this Indian man running towards me. After the introductions, he said let’s go across to meet my friend who is at a restaurant. I thought perhaps his friend ran an Indian restaurant. We ended up at a McDonald where his friend was working behind the counter. While chatting he mentioned that he was a merchant navy seaman and had jumped ship and stayed on. Married a Swedish girl and was quite happy staying on. He asked me what I did and where do you stay? I said that I lived in Hong Kong and worked in a bank. Looking at me seriously he asked “Are there any Swedish girls there. Get married to one and come to Sweden. It’s a great life here. I work for six months and live on dole for six months”. I promised to find some Swedish girl and be back in Sweden.

 A year later I got married to an Indian girl and had to keep working for thirty years before I could call it quits. Some guys just choose the long hard road.

As for my three friends, they are all in the Bay area, with one specializing in marketing and working for most of the technology names. One is in retailing and the last has his own business. I am the only one who decided to do a ghar wapsi in 2005.

 

 (This is a third blog which is autobiographical. The other two were written in 2014 and are attached in case you have any interest)

 

            A Friend’s Comments Come True

In March 2017, I received an email from a former Citibank colleague about a group visit to India which he cancelled. I was shocked for his reason, but unfortunately four and a half years later, he has proven right.

When I joined Citibank in February 1975 there was a Hong Kong Chinese colleague with whom I got along. We also attended a three-month training course in Manila in 1978. After a few years he moved to the US and about ten years later he moved back. We kept in touch sporadically prior to our moving back to Delhi in late 2005.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised to receive an email from him in November 2016, saying that a group of about 15 friends wanted to visit India and if I could introduce him to a travel agent who could take care of their travel plans. I introduced him to the agent whom we used.

A couple of months went by and I did not hear anything. I checked with my travel agent. With an embarrassed tone, she said that after two months of correspondence, he had cancelled their plans with a strange email. I asked her to send it to me.  She did and it read as follows:

“My group is very concerned about hygiene and health hazard to India and decided to put the tour on hold pending further deliberation. The concerns include “superbug” that according to a recent Bloomberg article 9 out of 10 foreigners got infected with superbug after visiting India. The other is the existence of feces and dead corpses in different places.”

I was absolutely livid and wrote to him that about a year ago my son, Simran got married and that we had seventy to eighty visitors from overseas, some of whom travelled all over India. None of them had fallen ill, other than the odd case of a stomach bug.  Also, that never in my life had I seen dead bodies lying on the streets. I also told him that he was being ridiculous and that the previous year India had almost nine million tourists and using his numbers at least eight million should have come down with the superbug. I quoted him a Bloomberg article which confirmed “That finding and other recent studies show antimicrobial resistance is a growing worldwide problem, with an especially high incidence in countries in South Asia, Southeast Asia, China, and some areas in southern Europe, such as Greece “said Lindsay Grayson, head of infectious diseases at the Austin Hospital in Melbourne ". He responded with a conciliatory message.

Now with the state the country is in I feel that I should write to him and say that perhaps he was right after all. All of you must have read enough and seen photographs of patients queuing up outside hospitals due to a lack of beds and erratic oxygen supplies and funeral pyres being light in parks. In the meantime, the politicians are playing politics about the supply of oxygen. State governments allowing elections, religious festivals and the list goes on.

 

The local politicians in the meantime talk about the virus being cured by drinking cow urine or rubbing cow dung. A couple of extreme videos circulating on social video show a group of men in Karnataka dipping in pool of cow dung shouting Jai Mata or crowds running through the streets with the air full of cow dung being showered on them.

A few months ago, we were strutting around the globe saying that we had slayed the virus beast and we were the world’s pharmacy. During this period specialists in India were warning the government of the impending tsunami, but they were ignored. We were trying to outdo China by handing out millions of vaccines doses to other countries. While all other countries around the world were placing orders of hundreds of millions of doses, we placed our first order in January 2021 for a relatively modest amount.

I am reminded of the sixties when we were dependent on the world for food grain and we were pitied. The US PL 480 together with the Green Revolution bailed us out. Now we have the Indian Air Force planes flying in oxygen plants “donated "by all the major developed nations to bail out the “super power”. Our credibility has been shattered.  To add salt to the wound, the Government is continuing to spend thousands of crores to build temples and government buildings. UP with its usual sense of priority, has set up help desks which can be approached by gaushalas or to deal with sick cows.

The population in the meantime is trying to do its best to manage the situation. The Residents Welfare Associations have organized vaccine camps, set up medical rooms with oxygen tanks and staffed by nurses. Their web sites act as resource centers for medicines, hospital beds, plasma and doctor contacts. Just seeing it at close quarters within our own apartment complex, it is amazing, heartening and joyful to see that the spirit of humanity is alive and willing to help out each other, providing leads, sourcing oxygen tanks, donating blood or plasma.

The party sycophants of course continue to praise the great job the government is doing and make other inane comments. One politician commenting on the oxygen shortage said that “the hospitals should use the oxygen judiciously and follow the guide lines “. The doctors at the hospitals are all mystified as to how to do that?  What else can I say?