November 7, 2007, was supposed to be the most glorious day of my professional career. Born in a dirt-poor village near India’s west coast, I arrived in the U.S. with $7, studied hard, and worked harder to arrive at a moment when all of my struggles and accomplishments would be recognized, even honored.

That morning I put on a freshly ironed white shirt, my best suit and black shoes especially polished for the day. My wife, Nalini, put on her most beautiful saree and favorite jewelry that she had brought from India. Our two adult children were also well dressed. I planned to take my family and a few friends that evening to Washington’s historic Willard Hotel for a glittering event at which Governing Magazine was honoring me with its prestigious “Public Official of the Year” award, established to “recognize and celebrate exceptional public leadership.”

I was going to receive the award at a gala ceremony also honoring Christine Gregoire, governor of the state of Washington; Fabian Nunez, speaker of the California Assembly; William White, mayor of Houston, Texas; and William Bratton, chief of police of Los Angeles, California. I could hardly wait till evening, when I would be honored as a distinguished public servant among these luminaries.

The day failed to unfold as I had hoped.

Very early that morning, as I was polishing my shoes, FBI agents knocked on the door of Harriet Walters, a mid-level official in the District of Columbia’s tax office. They roused her from bed and arrested her on charges of masterminding a major embezzlement scheme. They accused her of conspiring to siphon off $50 million in tax receipts over the course of nearly 20 years—under the noses of the agency’s leaders, including myself. For the past decade, I had been Harriet Walters’s boss, first as tax commissioner for the District, then as its chief financial officer.

That afternoon the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia held a press conference to provide details about the investigation into the corruption. City leaders lined up behind him included Mayor Adrian Fenty and me, the city’s CFO. The ever-aggressive Washington media attacked the District’s young mayor and accused him of a lack of vigilant management. How could such embezzlement go undetected for so many years?

Ignoring protocol, I rushed to the microphones and faced the cameras.

“It’s not the mayor’s fault,” I said. “If anyone was responsible, it has to be me. I was in charge of the tax office.”

Under the District’s unique governance structure, the CFO controlled the entire financial administration, including its tax office. “I am the CFO. Therefore, I should be the one held responsible.”

Suddenly the bright lights and TV cameras turned on me, and I was hammered with rapid-fire questions from reporters. So much for the day that should have been my crowning achievement.

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Ever since I moved to Washington in 1976, I had dreamed of being the focus of a press conference. I had imagined the president appointing me to direct a major federal agency. I would stand there enjoying my 15 minutes of fame. Press photographers would click their cameras as I listened to endless encomiums coming my way.

This press conference on November 7, 2007, however, was not the one that I had imagined. It basically appeared to end my dreams. Nothing good could come of this attention. I was being branded as a negligent manager under whose eyes a mid-level bureaucrat had been able to commit major embezzlement. The next day, and for weeks to come, The Washington Post and other papers carried news of the scandal on their front pages. I was an object of derision. The Post skewered the city government in editorials and depicted me in a derisive political cartoon. The scandal made news for what seemed an eternity. What I had foreseen as my 15 minutes of fame instead became 15 months of infamy and agony.

During those dark days, it was a foregone conclusion that I was a dead man walking. Every day I arrived at the office expecting a new revelation about the ever-expanding scandal. The pressure on me was so great that some of my friends and well-wishers thought I might emotionally unravel, that I might just throw in the towel and leave the city.

I didn’t. I couldn’t. I persevered. In the end, it is nothing short of a miracle that I survived the scandal and remained the District’s CFO for six more years. I provided crucial financial leadership during the Great Recession, when the District was under severe financial duress along with most state and local governments.

How did I manage that?

First of all, it was a matter of professional pride. I was determined not to let the scandal define me. If it happened on my watch—which it did—I would do whatever it took to fix it. Second, I wanted to restore my reputation. When I had joined the District in 1997 as its tax commissioner, the tax office was mostly broken. Practically nothing worked. The city was insolvent—it had run out of cash. But after more than a decade under my watch, the District was financially stable, flush with cash, its reputation on Wall Street restored. I was not going to let this scandal be the last word on my tenure in the city.

People often ask how I survived such a professional calamity.

Simple. I have an immigrant’s survival instinct. I have been through worse in my life. From my earliest days, I swam against the tides of traditional Indian culture. No matter what they say, Indians generally worship money and material success. We are a smart, disciplined and shrewd people, but we can be crass.

We measure success by the size of one’s bank account, the number of rooms in one’s home, the make of one’s car. That’s why my father urged me to become a successful businessman in Mumbai—to make money, show it off and send it home to support the family.

“Make money, not poetry!” he would yell at me. I recoiled and rebelled.

Blame it on Abraham Lincoln. And Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson and Ralph Waldo Emerson. And above all Mahatma Gandhi. They were my heroes; I wanted to be like them.  

Gandhi was a rather a curious case. In his autobiography, he presents a self-deprecating portrait of himself. As a young boy he was afraid of darkness. He was not a particularly good student. He barely made it through his bar exam in London. He could not argue his first case in court because he was too timid. He failed as a lawyer in Mumbai and left to go to South Africa to see whether he could make a living there. Some years later when he appeared before the Indian National Congress to present a resolution, he could not speak in front of such a gathering. His autobiography is a rich catalogue of his weaknesses and failings, particularly in his early life. Reading it as an impressionable young boy, I wondered… If such a weakling could become the Mahatma, why not me?

While my more enterprising peers in Mumbai were immersed in commerce, I was steeped in American literature and biography. My eyes were set on people like Lincoln, who changed the world for the better, rather than on those who made millions from building and selling a better mousetrap.

My ambition was to be a man of consequence. As a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, I wanted to be more than just an academic. I wanted be like Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, a much-celebrated writer and public-policy intellectual, who was once President Kennedy's ambassador to India and a major player in the Democratic Party during the 1950s and ‘60s. At the General Accounting Office, I strived to have an impact on public policy. My aim was to make a positive difference in the world. I refused to be ignored.

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In the age of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again,” survival instincts have become a necessity for Asian immigrants, among many others. On February 22, 2017, a young Indian software engineer named Srinivas Kuchibhotla was having a drink after work at his favorite bar in a small town southwest of Kansas City, where he and his wife had made their home. A disgruntled former Navy man named Adam Purinton confronted him and his friend, shouted racist slurs and said “get out of my country” before shooting Kuchibhotla. A few weeks shy of his 33rd birthday, he died of his wounds. Later Purinton pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison. India’s minister of external affairs tweeted: “I am shocked at the shooting incident in Kansas in which Srinivas Kuchibhotla has been killed. My heartfelt condolences to the bereaved family.” That was cold comfort to his mother, who said: “Now I want my younger son, Sai Kiran, and his family to come back for good. I will not allow them to go back.”

No doubt Kuchibhotla’s tragic death is a sign of the times. All of a sudden, a climate of fear has spread across immigrant communities, including among South Asians who have made this country their home. His widow, Sunayana Dumala, asked on her Facebook page: “Do we belong here? Is this the same country we dreamed of and is it still secure to raise our families and children here?”

I confronted that question in 1965 when I contemplated my prospects in the teeming streets of Mumbai. Like Kuchibhotla, I was itching for adventure. For me, an impoverished young man, the answer was clear: Go west, young man—go to America! I boarded an Air India flight in 1965 on a one-way ticket that took me across the oceans, not knowing when, if ever, I would return.

But why did I choose America? Why not elsewhere in the West? Millions of Indians have migrated to Canada, Great Britain, Australia and even to non-English-speaking countries of Europe. Some have even gone to Russia! Similarly, some Indians have also made their home in the burgeoning economies of East Asia or the Middle East. In an earlier era, they had gone to Africa to make their fortunes. 

I chose America because more than any other country it has the tradition of accepting and absorbing immigrants. It gives them a chance to remake their life and I got that chance for a life that would otherwise have been wasted in India. Here, at last, what matters is what I know and can do and not where I come from or how I look or what my hereditary lineage is.

For an immigrant with skills, America is heaven if you know what you want to do with your life and are willing to work at it. Only in America can an Asian immigrant like me become the chief financial officer of the nation’s capital. This nation’s generous people open their hearts and doors to immigrants like me and let them pursue their dreams. And that is why America is still the most favored destination for tens of millions around the world. The best and brightest as well as the tired and poor come to America, invited or not. Surveys show—and images from the evening news confirm—that people want to come here even when risking their lives.

My story is both cautionary and instructive, difficult yet uplifting. Ultimately, it is a harrowing tale of how to survive in India and succeed in America. It was an uncertain beginning, in some ways even more difficult than immigrants face today. In this winter of American discontent, when a presidential candidate rode into the White House based in part on his anti-immigrant rhetoric, it is rather quaint to say, as I do, “America is still the promised land for immigrants like me.” Especially when Indians and Asians have been targets of some of the worst violence against America’s newcomers.

In singing America’s glory, I am not ignoring what is bad and ugly here.  Like anyone I also see crime, drugs, social promiscuity, homelessness, profound economic inequality, racial discrimination and, above all, its toxic, special-interest-driven tribal politics that have debased the public square.  And, yes, I too feel the sting of discrimination—crank calls from crazies telling me to go back home. But where would I go? This is my home, now and forever!

Most Americans take their country for granted. I don’t. I know better. I am from the Old World, where America is still the place to go. When I hear people denigrating America, I am reminded of a poem by Ray Bradbury:

America

We are the dream that other people dream.
The land where other people land
When late at night, they think on flight
And, flying, here arrive
Where we fools dumbly thrive ourselves.

Refuse to see
We be what all the world would like to be.

How dumb! Newcomers cry, you are mad! They shout,
We’d sell our souls if we could be you.
How come you cannot see the way we see you?

You be the hoped-for thing a hopeless world would be.
You are the dream that other people dream.

I am a citizen now, and celebrate July 4th. But the day of my biggest celebration each year is October 10th. On that day in 1965, I landed in America. That is my Independence Day. Here’s how I found my way to America and achieved the American dream.

There is yet another reason why I write this memoirs.  The story I write here is that of an immigrant who migrated from India empty handed when he was twenty-five and lived better part of life in the U. S., the country of his dreams where his dreams came true. Yet, millions of immigrants stream into the country.  After all, the country is made of immigrants and their descendents.  So what is so special about my story as an immigrant?  More than a story, this memoirs is my tribute to America.

In this winter of American discontent of 2016, when a presidential candidate rode into the White House based upon his anti-immigrant rhetoric, it is rather quaint thing to say this is still the Promised Land for immigrants like me. In singing America’s glory, I am not ignoring what is bad and ugly here–crime, drugs, social promiscuity, the homelessness, racial discrimination, and its special interest driven toxic politics. And, yes I too feel the sting of discrimination–crank calls from crazies asking me to go back home. But where would I go? This is home now!

As I write this in June of 2017, what was just an occasional crank call for me, “go back to your country,” has turned into two shootings of Indians, one fatal by apparent strangers. All of sudden a climate of fear has spread across immigrant communities, particularly among South Asians who have made this country their home.  There was a recent report that catalogued  “incidents of hate violence and xenophobic political rhetoric aimed at South Asian, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Middle Eastern, and Arab communities” from late December 2015 through Nov. 15, 2016, one week after the presidential election.¹ That represented a 34 percent increase in incidents in less than a third of the period since 2014. As the young widow of a computer engineer who was gunned down in a Kansas bar said on her Facebook page: “Do we belong here? Is this the same country we dreamed of and is it still secure to raise our families and children here?”²

There are larger issues that also bother me about contemporary America.  Above all, the disintegration of American family. Family is a stabilizing force in any society.  The gradual disintegration of American family over last half century has been relentless and profoundly worrying. This has a lot do with extreme emphasis on individual liberty, lax social mores, sexual promiscuity, and casual attitude towards marital obligations, particularly children. What Senator Moynihan prophetically warned about black families in 1965 might now be applied to all American families, including, white.³ He reported that out of wedlock births among black were about 24 percent, today that rate is around seventy percent.  “In 2015, nearly a third of all children (31 percent) were being raised by single parents or no parent at all, up from 15 percent in 1970. Over the same period, births to single mothers jumped from 11 percent of all births to 40 percent.”⁴ The recent book Hillbilly Elegy narrates this issue with great alarm.⁵ Despite all the issue with traditional families such as the one in which I was raised in India, a child is assured of family stability which is critical for early childhood development. Immigrants like me bring with us that social capital of family stability that has saved us so far from the ravages resulting from volatility of contemporary American family. Extraordinary success of the second and third generation Indian Americans might be attributed to this family stability.

This emphasis on family as a basis of good society is at variance from what the British anthropologist Edmund Leach argued in his Reith Lectures. He concluded that, "Far from being the basis of the good society, the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents."⁶  I have lived for many years in an Indian extended family and would not prefer to live there again. Yet, the kind of assurance a stable family gives to a growing child should not be underestimated. In a traditional Indian family, when a child comes home from school in the evening, he or she never has to face the problem of a missing parent because parents divorced.

I must admit that I am also disillusioned by the special interest driven descent of American politics into a quagmire that has immobilized not only Washington but also state governments. I had always credited American people with pragmatism, but of late, I have doubts. I hope this is temporary and that America will get back its mojo again.  Further, as historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once pointed out America gets into a kind of collective lunacy every thirty years or so and gets into an unnecessary war–Korea, Vietnam, Iraq.  It is almost an American affliction, but because the destructiveness of American power, its consequences are catastrophic for a people that are at the receiving end of the lunacy. If my first book of poems, America, America, was a celebration of my adopted country, the latest book of poems, Pennsylvania Avenue was a scathing indictment.⁷

Yet, despite all its ills, I do not see America as a tragic country, as it is fashionable to say among some select intellectual circles.⁸  On the country, I see it as a triumphant nation that has provided an unprecedentedly high standard of living and freedom of expression to the majority of its heterogenous people.  No other country has done it on such vast American scale.  It has made good life possible even for the common man.  It gives him a chance to make something of his life by liberating him from the crushing burden of poverty plaguing most of the world. Any country that can do it within mere two hundred years of its formation should not be called tragic.

I still say that if you know what you want do with your life then America is still the place to come. Here in America you get your chance to make your mark in life.  Here at last, what matters is what you know and what you can do.  Its generous people still open their hearts and doors for immigrants like me and let them pursue their dreams and remake their lives.  As long as that spirit is alive and well, America will remain great, Trump or No Trump! No demagogue can detract America from its manifest destiny and no terrorist can make it lose its bearing.  For an immigrant like me it is baffling to hear some of its opportunistic politicians bad mouthing America. 

Most Americans take their country for granted.  I don’t.  I know better.  I am from the old world, where they still see America as the Promised Land, and keep their eyes on that prize of the Promised Land.  When I hear people denigrating America, I am reminded of a poem by Ray Bradbury: ⁹

America

We are the dream that other people dream.
The land where other people land
When late at night, they think on flight
And, flying, here arrive where we fools dumbly thrive ourselves.
Refuse to see we be what all the world would like to be.
How dumb! Newcomers cry, you are mad! They shout,
We’d sell our souls if we could be you
How come you cannot see the way we see you?
You be the hoped-for thing a hopeless world would be
You are the dream that other people dream.

I am a citizen now, and I celebrate July 4, but the day of my biggest celebration each year is October 10–on that day of October 1965, I landed in America.  That is my Independence Day!

On Being Uprooted

I still have to face the fundamental issue of migration–of being uprooted–that all immigrants face. Famed novelist Salman Rushdie referring to his migration to United Kingdom writes, “migration tore up all the roots of the self.  The rooted self flourished in a place it knew well, among the people who knew it well, following customs and traditions with which it and its community were familiar and speaking its own language among others who did the same.”¹⁰ Migrating to England Rushdie felt the loss of three of his four roots: place, community, culture. The fourth one–the language, English, was still with him there. The fundamental difference between Rushdie and migrants like me is the social and economic conditions in which we were raised and lived before we migrated.  He came from an affluent family living in an exclusive area, and went to a private school. He was blessed with all the privileges and prerogatives that go with being rich in India. Had he lived through all the harrowing times that I had gone through in Mumbai, he would not be much talking about “my beloved Bombay.” He hated to leave the city which I had hated passionately and wanted to leave desperately.  Poverty trumps most of our personal likes and dislikes.

The perennial issue for an immigrant is: where do I belong? This is an intensely personal issue. Given all the slights, hurts, humiliations and hopelessness that I had endured in Mumbai, I knew I did not belong there.  When my lucky break came, I took the first available opportunity to jump the ship.  After living in the U. S. for more than fifty years, I know where I belong and that is not India.  Every time I go back to Mumbai and other places in India, I would be at a loss there now.  After every visit when I return to the U. S., I feel I have come home.  That is not just because I am now used to my American amenities, but because America has given me my human dignity.  In Mumbai, I felt worthless while in America I am valued for who I am and I feel good about myself that was never the case in India.

There is another reason why millions of poor people like me want to come to America. Rushdie like many who migrated to England, found that the country’s establishment was “not letting them in.”¹¹ That is not how I found the U. S. Given the record of amazing success of even the first generation Indian immigrants, among others, American society at large and the establishment in particular have been open to immigrants, particularly those who are educated and skilled.  Just imagine several major American corporations, universities and their business schools are now headed by first generation Indian Americans. Citing my own example I could say that only in America, a first generation Asian Indian with accent could become Chief Financial Officer of the nation’s capital with extraordinary power and responsibilities. But even those immigrants who are not educated and skilled in professions have found a way to achieve their American dream as long as they were willing to work hard. For example, the less educated but entrepreneurial Indians have been remarkably successful in running small businesses as convenience stores, donut shops, laundries, motels, gas stations, grocery stores, etc.  Simply put, if you are willing to work, work is there!

In my long life spanning two countries and nearly eight decades I have made many mistakes but coming to America is not one of them. Indeed, that was the best thing that has happened to me. And I was glad to give up all the things that Rushdie was loathe to give up–place, community, culture. I even lost the fourth one–the language. Yet, I am happy that I came to America that gave me the opportunity to be who I am today.

My Indian story as well early experiences in America narrated here appear so dated now. I am writing about the events and things that have happened some sixty or more years ago. Though some events are still vivid in my mind, most are buried under the layers of hazy memories. As we remember past to write about it, there is a some invention as well. Some sort of palimpsest is inevitable.  But then this is not history, it is memoir. Of course, any thing we remember of a distant past is colored by our subjectivity. However, there is no other way to remember the past. “Such subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory, and follows from its basis and mechanisms in the human brain. The wonder is that aberrations of a gross sort are relatively rare, and that, for the most part, our memories are relatively solid and reliable.”¹²

References :

1. See Amy Wang, “A man assumed a store’s Indian owners were Muslim. So he tried to burn it down, police say.” The Washington Post, March 12, 2017.  Also see, Power, Pain, Potential–South Asian Americans at the Forefront of Growth and Hate in 2016 Election Cycle, SAALT, 2017

2. See Editorial, The Washington Post, March 8, 2017

3. Daniel P. Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Washington, D.C., Office of Policy Planning and Research, U.S. Department of Labor, 1965.

4. Robert Samuelson, “Trump is not destiny. Here’s what it is.” The Washington Post,” June 12, 2017, p. A17. Samuelson summarises the finding of Report of Joint Economic Committee, The State of Associational Life in America, SCP Report 1-17

5. J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy (New York: Harper Press), 2016

6. Edmund Leach, A Runaway World? (New York, Oxford University Press, 1968), p.44

7.  Natwar Gandhi, America, America (2006) and Pennsylvania Avenue (2011), Mumbai: Image Publications.

8.  Natwar Gandhi, “Still the Promised Land,” The Washington Post, June 13. 1989, op-ed

9.  Ray Bradbury, America: An Ode to Immigrants, The Wall Street Journal, May 17, 2006.

10.  Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton, New York: Random House, 2012, p. 53.

11.  Rushdie, ibid, p, 69.

12. Oliver Sacks, “Speak Memory, The New York Review, February 21, 2013.

e.mail : natgandhi@yahoo.com

In his first Independence Day speech, “A Tryst with Destiny,” at the midnight hour on August 14,  1947, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru famously asked his fellow citizens: “Whither do we go and what shall be our endeavor? To bring freedom and opportunity to the common man…to build up a prosperous, democratic and progressive nation, and to…ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman.”  As I ponder on what would the Prime Minister of India say from  ramparts of the Red Fort on August 15, 2047 at the completion of India’s first hundred years as a free and independent nation? I imagine he or she would say that we have travelled far, wide and long from the day when Pandit Nehru gave his now famous speech with ceiling fans furiously circling overhead in the parliament before a rapt audience of fellow freedom fighters.

As I look ahead thirty years from now, at the end of first century of its independence, India would have still remained a free and integrated country despite its continental size and myriad of differences among its widely varied people. At the time of independence, however, imperialists in UK and elsewhere were quick to warn that an Independent India would not survive long. During fifties and sixties, there was no shortage of observers at home and abroad who ominously predicted that the country would soon disintegrate.  Some even called it “an area of darkness,” and wrote it off. Despite all this foreboding, India has survived as a largely secular, liberal democracy while many countries that got their independence just about the same time have descended into periodic dictatorships, military rules, or worse, chaos. I am quite sure that India will celebrate centenary of its independence as the most populous, largely stable, and mostly secular democratic country in the world.

By the time the hundredth anniversary of its independence arrives, India would have made substantial progress toward reducing the crushing burden of poverty that has plagued Indian masses all through its modern history. By year 2047, I predict a globalized Indian economy buoyed by a vastly improved infrastructure, an integrated national market, and an expanding manufacturing sector that would draw rural masses to its vibrant metropolis and would provide them with a better life.

However, I also see two danger signs. First, thirty years from now, I see India most likely facing massive challenges of environmental degradation and air pollution unless drastic measures are taken now to protect environment and curb pollution. Second, its demographic dividend–the largest pool of young people ready to work in the world–could become a major liability if the economy does not produce enough jobs.  If this expanding workforce–a million or more a month–is not gainfully employed, then I see India failing to achieve its full potential.  

Despite resilience and resourcefulness of people of India, the country has been hamstrung for over a century by an obdurate and insensitive bureaucracy and a feudal framework of social and political institutions.  This iron frame has to be reshaped because it has hindered India’s march towards a nation of Pandit Nehru’s vision on that day in 1947 when he said we had “a tryst of destiny.”

e.mail : natgandhi@yahoo.com

Natwar Gandhi was Chief Financial Officer of Washington, DC during 2000-2013

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