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[JITESH JAGGI]: Hi this is Jitesh Jaggi from National into American Museum for the Oral History project, now interviewing Lakshmi Menon at her residence. Can you please state and spell your name?
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[LAKSHMI MENON]: My name is Lakshmi Menon L-a-k-s-h-m-i M-e-n-o-n
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[JJ]: And Lakshmi, when and where were you born?
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[LM]: I was born in a small village in Kerala in the southern part of India on November 8th, 1945
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[JJ]: What languages did you speak growing up?
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[LM]: Growing up we spoke mostly Malayalam or English in the home and because my father worked for the government depending on where he was posted or transferred to, we kids would pick up the language of the local place. A lot of the time he was in the north part of India so I did pick up Hindi, for a while he was at a place called Shillong which was at that time in Assam, so we picked up a few words of Assamese which I have since forgotten, and then we were in Bangalore so then I started to learn a little Kannada but none of them would I say I was fluent in, but could get by with visiting a store and indicating what I wanted--that kind of fluency I had. And then just before he retired, my father was posted to the United States so then we had no problem because we already knew English very well.
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[JJ]: I see. Discuss some of your experiences growing up in India and then we can move on to some of your experiences when you moved here in your childhood.
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[LM]: Experiences growing up in India I think we were fairly typical of any middle-class family. My parents enrolled me in what was at that time called Convent schools which were actually run by missionaries because they would-I think most families in India- wanted the children to have an English as a medium of instruction. They saw English as the gateway to the rest of the world and actually also to the rest of India, because if you grew up learning and speaking only the mother tongue that you were born into, you pretty much were confined to that specific state and you wouldn't be able to live and work easily in another state because the language would be so different there.
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So English pretty much opened up all of India and also later on, it turned out, the rest of the world. So I grew up in convent schools which are basically missionary schools and I think we had a typical schoolgirl kind of life with friends and family and I can't say that anything was distinctive about that. We listened-- we watched a lot of American movies those days. Movies were--Hollywood movies--that were very much the thing to see, and we listened to American pop music. The Indian film industry, because of it being in regional languages and not nearly as prominent as it is now, was not much of a factor in our lives, though in the Hindi speaking world and among Hindi speaking families, it was already very major entertainment. In my family and others like me who were living in places where we were not growing up traditionally, we turned- tended to look to English kinds of entertainment.
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[JJ]: At what age did you move here with your father?
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[LM]: I think I was almost 12. My father was posted at- he was in the Finance Ministry of the government of India and he was posted here to the Embassy as a financial adviser. And so we moved here, my father, my mother, my two brothers and I, and because we were given an allowance to bring domestic help, we were also able to bring along our family maid who had been with us for years. So it was basically an Indian household that just happened to be transplanted to the US for the three and a half or four years that he was posted in this country.
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[JJ]: Do you remember any contrasts in the way you were living in India and now -the way you (inaudible) are living (inaudible)?
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[LM]: Contrast between the two? Very much
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[JJ]: During your adolescence
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[LM]: Yeah, it was during my adolescence so I would say it would be probably during a very formative time of my life. Before we moved here we were living in Bangalore and the system of education was very different at that time. We had--I guess by age 12 I was already, you know, doing Algebra, geometry, physics, all these things because in India at that time anyway, you built up each of those subjects a little from year to year. So when I arrived here at age 12, first of all, my parents were keen that I should join high school because they--my father--knew that this was a posting of at least three years and in those days you could join College when you were 16 in India. So he felt that if I didn't finish High School by the time he was posted back I would be over-age for college. And so he went to the principal and they were aghast, they absolutely wouldn’t hear of a twelve-year-old going to high school.
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And then my father made the argument that well it's alright for you people in America but in India the average life expectancy is only 45 and I can't have my daughter be spending this much of her life in in school when she has to finish college and get on with her life before she dies. They had no reply to that argument that, you know, that **laughs** I would be spending two thirds of my life getting an education! And so they worked out a program where I would join in 9th grade. Social experiences were very much given a lot of importance in this country. When I was growing up in India I went to a girls’ school and everybody-- nobody really bothered about these kind of things. Double promotions and things were very much common. They didn't care about the age of the child. If the child did well, they promoted her or skipped a grade. It wasn't that major a deal. But in this country, and it was co-educational, it did matter and that's what they were concerned about, (was) my emotional maturity.
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So they worked out a program where I would join in 9th grade and then skip 10th grade but get all my academic credits in through summer school. So that by the time I graduated high school I think I was 15 and a half or almost 15, I think, and I did not get over age for college as my parents had worried about when we went back to India. And I found that I had no problem academically because I was already familiar with the kind of-- my classmates were given algebra classes for the very first time, and I already had two years of Algebra. So academically there was no problem at all. But I think they were right. Socially I became very shy and very, very, very withdrawn because I was just a kid and these-- my classmates-- were dating and into boyfriends and, you know, in a totally different orbit so that made me, I think, pull back and become very shy. It took awhile for me to come out of that shell.
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[JJ]: I assume there weren't many other Indian students around you?
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[LM]: Oh no, I was the only one
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[JJ]: The only one
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[LM]: Yes and that that was also--it was nice. It was a very welcoming environment and because I was… I think I was the only one and then a couple of years later in high school two black girls joined. Otherwise I probably was the only girl of color but I wasn't very much aware of that because people--everybody--just kind of made me feel so welcome and they were so interested in in my life. This was a time when they really thought India was snake charmers and elephants in the streets, so they were pleasantly surprised to see that I was speaking English and I had friends and it was something that I think I didn't feel I didn't feel like I wasn't welcome. That was a great help.
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[JJ]: I see. Did your family--Did you grow up in a religious household, did that religion kind of come with you from India:
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[LM]: My family on both sides, they are Hindu by birth but neither my father nor my mother believed in any of the rituals so so though we all--with my grandmother we learned our Hindu prayers and every evening we would recite them, it wasn’t very much like a part of our spiritual awareness. We talked of God in an abstract, but we didn’t like specifically celebrate Janmashtami Or a specific Hindu festival other than, you know. in Kerala it’s a little different-- we don't-- we have a new year called Vishu which is in the middle of April, and then we have a Harvest Festival in August or September call Onam, and these are the two major festivals of Kerala and interestingly, neither of them is linked to any deity.
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As far as I know they're seasonal celebrations. So we would celebrate those, and then we’d join in the celebrations of whoever was observing whatever. But in our own household, we didn’t even have like a a place of puja which was--Just before going to bed, my mother would sit with us, we’d sit cross-legged on the floor, light the lamp and she would make us recite some things, but I can't say that we had any real rituals we followed or religious teachings--no.
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[JJ]: Any siblings that came along with you?
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[LM]: I have an older brother and a younger brother all three of us ended up coming to America. My younger brother has since returned. He spent about 20-- or more than 20 years-- he was in investment banking in New York and when, under I believe it was under Narasimha Rao, the Indian government had started opening up a little, and he had always talked of going back to India and much to the joy of my parents who-- typically Indian parents tend to keep at least one child at home who will be with them for their old age. But my parents were very keen that all three of us should be together. So when my younger brother decided to come back, they really were very happy, though they would have never been the ones to tell him please come back. So he went back and he started life pretty much all over again in India. But we stayed on without ever intending to. We thought we'd come for two years--it’s the typical story of--with the professionals who came in the sixties, we just ended up staying on.
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[JJ]: During the period that you did come here did you see a difference in experience, like how your brothers were experiencing the country, how did they take to it or did they also withdrew within themselves, just like you did, did you see that they were having it easier or harder than you
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[LM]: I think my younger brother was still very little. He was in Elementary School and and he was--interestingly, I don't know, now that you bring this up, whether this would have played any role in it, but he's very much lighter skinned than I Am-- and it's possible, and this is me looking back and trying to find reasons--but it's possible that he wasn't noticeably as different from the rest of the population as I was. I don't know how to say-- we lived in a very white area. We lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland which is sort of a-- we didn't know it at the time, but with my awareness of things as an adult I realize that that was quite an elite neighborhood to be living in. It was-- our next door neighbor was the assistant Secretary of State and across from us was a retired ambassador to Greece so it was that kind of company that we grew up in, and we didn’t think it was anything special. we just thought that was normal.
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My older brother, now he is much darker skinned than I am. Now whether that had any effect on him I can’t say. But he had-- he hung out with a lot of the boys who were into sports and things. So I don't think either of us felt like we didn't have a niche that we fit into because nowhere did we feel a sense of-- that you-- why don't you go back to your own country kind of attitude which is a little more-- which is a lot more prevalent I would say these days,
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[JJ]: I see. And this was your first and last time that you moved here or was there like going back and a reentry or did you end up staying here ever since?
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[LM]: Oh no. When I finished my high school my father had got posted back to India and he had retired also. He was of Retirement age, so being in the US was the last government posting he had and then we returned to New Delhi, which is where I joined college. So then there was no discussion of anybody staying on. The whole household just moved back. And this is part of that life as a government servant. You just are on the move and you go where your father is transferred. That was pretty much what it was.
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[JJ]: I am interested in--when you went back to Delhi--like were you able to like--did you have to acclimate yourself again, or was that easier? to the place where you able to live again
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[LM]: Going back to Delhi as a 16, almost 16 year old, it didn’t really feel like I was out of place because- you know- every I was joining college and everybody was new to college so we were all starting out on the same footing. Where it really it was amusing was that I went to Lady Shri Ram College in Delhi and Delhi University had this requirement that you had to have Hindi as part of your requirements. I was studying English literature honors but Hindi was a requirement and I had not had Hindi for years because I had been in Bangalore and then I had been in the US so no way I could have taken on Hindi at the college level that they had expected. So they did have a provision for foreign students that they could be excused from Hindi and take a very basic kind of beginning Hindi exam to pass to be eligible for the college degree.
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So I was given that foreign student exemption even though I was an Indian. That was an amusing kind of result of having stayed overseas before college. But I didn't feel any kind of sense of having to readjust. There was a group of my parents’ friends, all of whom had returned from the US and were posted to Delhi, so there was that little Network and then everybody else was also new to college so no sense of being sort of strange or out of place.
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[JJ]: Talk about your re-entry into the United States –when, why?
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[LM]: After college, As is typical for those days, your parents start looking for a husband. And I had actually thought that I'd be going on for further studies to Oxford because I was doing English literature and being in English literature and getting a chance to study in Oxford was like a dream come true, but unknown to me, my parents had been receiving suggestions about boys who were eligible. They had not wanted to distract me from my studies or my ideas of what I wanted to do. I thought I would be a journalist and they didn't want me to lose my focus on that because they thought it was silly for the girl to occupy her head with thoughts about men and romance. They wanted the girl to be studying and focus on what she would be after she graduated and not get diverted by what they thought were silly thoughts.
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But in the meanwhile they were looking, you know so, and mutual friends kept talking to them and to my husband Arvind’s parents about how perfect the two of us would be for each other because though the two families didn’t know each other, the mutual friends realized the two families had so much in common and such a close (inaudible) in outlook that they just felt like the children of these families would be very well suited for each other. And so then after graduation some of us girls had gone on a trip to Naini Tal, a hill station in the north part of India where one of my classmates lived. We were out hiking in the hills and one day when we came back from the hills to my friend's house there was my father's Chevrolet Impala--I have to tell you that families who lived in the fifties in the United States, when they went back to India they all took back Chevy Impalas or Chevy Bel Airs.
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For some reason, the word in the Indian Community was that this was the thing you needed to have when you go back to India. That’s the car that's that's really going to do well there. Everybody-- you are allowed to--the government gives you an allowance to ship back your car, your household possessions. So much of the three and a half years that most families were posted to--the three to four years that families are posted at the embassy, while the men were at work, the women and children consulted with each other on what were the good things to buy to take back to India. This occupied a lot of time so the car was one thing, in addition to, of course blenders and all those things that you couldn't get in India those days, because India had a very restrictive import policy. So these were all items that you could only get if you lived abroad, and You had the allowance to ship it all back to your own country. So there was my father's white Impala parked outside my Friend’s house in Naini Tal. And we were all very surprised and immediately my friend started teasing me, “I bet you there's some big news for you, I bet you there’s somebody.”
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The thought of marriage was so far from my head because my parents had never talked about it, that I thought, ‘No, there must be some something that has happened in the Family.’ So then we came in and there was my father and he wanted me to come back home and then he had to do a lot of explaining to me about why he needed me back home and I was I was not happy with my holiday getting cut short and a totally different plan of action as far as the course of my life was concerned. But anyway, being the good child that I was, I went back home and then the rest is history. We got safely back to Delhi, my mother was aghast because I was sunburned and not looking my best--oh yeah, much darker and peeling. And so they had to call in a friend who was very much into beauty and I was given facials and what’s the word for it--restorative kind of work and then we travelled to Madras, which is now known as Chennai, where in my aunt’s house there was a tea arranged. Arvind and his family were supposed to come and visit and that's where we met.
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[JJ]: And so, did Arvind get a posting in the US? Did you follow him? Or was there a plan?
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[LM]: He had just completed his postgraduate medical degree which is called the MD in India. His family had a long tradition of (inaudible) they come from a family of physicians and all of them went to England. So his plan had been that he would go to England for further training. He wanted to do Cardiology. So this was the other factor that came in. Oh, she's already lived in America so she'll be quite comfortable in the West. So this would be a good idea if they were to get married, were among the different thoughts that were flying around in the air with the parents of the two people concerned.
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And he had started applying to places in England. Both of us didn’t particularly care for each other at that meeting, and we didn’t really even speak very much to each other. I think I was given the task of serving tea to everyone and I asked him if he took sugar or not. That was pretty much it. We didn't have very much of an opportunity to decide or even get a sense of each other but the parents all loved each other. **laughs** They hit it off great! And both of us, I guess we have a strong sense of duty to our parents that somehow does get inculcated in you When you’re growing up in India and so we-- I was not the girl of his dreams, he was not the man of my dreams but we both felt like our parents think this is right for us. So maybe there is something in this, you know. And as it turned out, he had an older brother who was not yet married, and his mother was very keen that the older brother should marry first before the younger one.
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So that took about eight or nine months for them to find a girl for the older brother, And in that time we got to know each other and we began to understand that yes our parents were right, we do seem to have a way to connect and have a life together that we would like. So he he claims that I'm the one that said let's not go to England let's go to America. I don't think so, but anyway-- I mean I might have told him about how nice America was-- that I'm sure I did and there was an opportunity to apply (phone rings)
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[JJ]: Continuing our last--
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[LM]: Was I talking about--?
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[JJ]: Who decided. Because I have also interviewed your husband, Arvind. On record what I have is that you suggested America had central heating and in England they had to like feed shillings into the heater. That was one of the factors.
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[LM]: **laughs** Well, I think that did make an impression on me. But I think he's somebody who thinks for himself. Has always thought for himself so I'm not sure that that's the reason that he would have decided to come to America. But I certainly did like being in America more than I liked being in England. Because we had passed through England on our journey here. I should backtrack a bit. When we came with my family actually my father flew on ahead, but my mother and the kids and the maid had come by ship from Bombay. So we had a 2 week or so layover in England before we came to New York. So that's that was my taste of life in England and that that may have colored or Arvind claims that colored his decision to come to the U.S. America that time was opening up as you know. In the mid-sixties with the Vietnam War and all there was such a shortage of trained professionals doctors, engineers, scientists, researchers…
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So actually what had happened was in my husband's case while they were in medical school in their final year or maybe while they were doing their internships, a lady from the United States Information Services had come by and asked them to please take this Examination for foreign medical graduates I don't know if he told you this. It was called the ECFMG I don't know what the E stands --what the E and C are but the FMG is for Foreign Medical Graduates--maybe Educational Council for Foreign Medical Graduates or something. They-- doctors coming to the US had to have passed that exam. That measured their medical competence and I think their language skills. So there was such an extreme shortage of doctors in this country and actually all trained professionals, that agents had actually started traveling all over the world looking for people to fill these positions. So this lady was not an agent. She was an employee of the USIS who went to their medical college and told all these students to take this exam, because then if you do well, we have a position waiting for you in the United States. And that's something that you should think about.
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And these-- my husband and his classmates were not really that much into it, but she said you know, what have you got to lose? And they had really nothing else planned that day. Most of the time, they, if they were not studying, they were loafing around looking for movies and things of that sort. And they had already seen all the movies that were in town and the exam was that day. And then the other hurdle was that there was a $50 fee and none of them could afford a $50 fee for taking the exam. And to give you an idea of how acute the shortage was, this lady said don't worry about that fee, when you come to the United States and you start earning there, you’ll be able to pay it then.
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[JJ]: Wow
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[LM]: And I can't help but contrast that with current medical graduates many have come to –
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[JJ]: So during all these years raising your children by yourself while Arvind was so busy as a doctor were you homesick often or did you-- how did you maintain correspondence with your family and friends back home?
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[LM]: Homesickness-- I think for the early years of living here, yes. Because, especially growing up in India you're so attached to your family-- almost to the extent I would say that I had my family and cousins and relatives were our Social Circle and after that comes the circle of friends. Specially being a girl you didn't go out entirely on your own very much so your family was very much your social life also. And so that aspect was very much not available during the early years of living here and then being totally overwhelmed with having to take care of kids by yourself because-- you know-- your husband is not there and we can’t afford to hire help because we’re living on a resident’s salary or a fellow’s salary was hard. So that way you missed the family. I especially missed having parents around or the older generation around that you could look to for advice because whoever was with us even if they were from India, from our own culture, was your age.
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There was not the benefit of the long view of the more experienced generation helping you, to tell you this this is what kids are normally like, or here's what you should do in this situation. And I especially felt that when at age 42 my husband underwent coronary bypass surgery. Our kids were I think six and nine or something like that or 7 and 10 and this was completely out-of-the-blue. He's always been very, very fit but I guess it's genetic and not much was known at that time. Bypass surgery was still very much in its infancy and life expectancy was about five years for people who have had that surgery. This played a very big role in how we approached life in this country after that. We didn't know any more--we’ve got this thing hanging over our heads. While we were dealing with that and the recovery period and all, I so missed having family around.
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My friends were there, but I needed somebody of my mother's generation to tell--to comfort me-- somebody who I could put my head on their shoulder and somebody would stroke my back and say things will be okay, that's when I really really miss--a sense of not having someone who is part of your home. Home is where you grow up. I think no matter how long you live away, you always think of home as where you grew up with your parents--or at least I do. Now when I go somewhere of town and I come back I come back to this house and I’m home. But there's another home that I think is always where your mom is. Because your mom has you in her heart and that’s your home-- at least for me.
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[JJ]: Phone calls were not as accessible as they are today?
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[LM]: Phone calls were expensive and remember, we were trying to get by on a salary that was barely--we’re getting by. We were able to afford--we got a loan and bought our first home, so it wasn’t like dire poverty or anything. And by nature in both our families we haven’t craved very much by way of material Goods. So you know I wasn't that much into jewelry and we didn’t crave fancy cars and all this kind of stuff, so it was quite okay to live within our means. We managed. But we wrote letters. Because we would only call home if there was something important to communicate. And almost always it had to be bad news.
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We would wait for letters from home and apparently our letters back to India would get circulated among all the nearby relatives. It was a time when any connection happened through those blue aero grams or those –what were they called: inland letters. We’d just wait. I’d go through the mail looking for a blue cover to know that I had a letter from my mother or his mother. Homesickness did play a role. I got very-- Once the kids were a little older and didn't need constant attention I got very involved with volunteer work and I found that very fulfilling.
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[JJ]: I was going to actually ask you that next question--like –how did you maintain your connection with that heritage, your Indian heritage? Was it through being involved with voluntary work or was it by recreating some of that maybe by something like cooking for example, some people do that.
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[LM]: I didn't set out to consciously to maintain a connection with my heritage I think my heritage was always with me I didn't need to connect to it. I did try to get my kids to learn something about Indian ways and I don't know if I succeeded very much because we joined-- neither Arvind nor I were joiners of groups. Indian associations had started in Chicago because by then, the mid-seventies, in Chicago there was enough of a critical mass that--This was a big cultural shift actually from Kentucky when we came to Chicago. Kentucky we were at the University and academic life is very different from when we came here to Highland Park Illinois and became part of the general world. And it was more like a business community and Indians were not necessarily all at the University. They were doing other things and that was a culture shift for me.
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And I realized that values also changed because now people seemed to measure their achievements--at universities you measured achievement by how you are regarded by your peers in terms of your papers you've published, your scientific breakthroughs and so on. But in the rest of the world outside that Ivory Tower you’re measured more by how big your house is, what car you drive, those kind of things. This was a major culture shock for me, and that's when I started to feel out of place. Actually not so much that my being Indian was what was making me feel out of place. It was that I did not value those things, that I kind of didn't feel a need to have this statement that I have arrived because I'm now wearing a mink coat--that sort of feeling. I didn't have that but-- I'm sorry I digressed, what was your question?
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[JJ]: Actually that was useful information that you talked about. The question extends to the next question, which is pretty much talking about what organizations locally you are connected with and volunteered for.
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[LM]: Oh Yes. you were asking how I connected to my heritage, and I suppose if you were on the outside analyzing you would say I maintained connection to the Heritage because I continued to cook Indian food, which my children going to school, did not really love very much. But now that they have left the house, they crave it tremendously. The other ways-- we joined one Indian organization which was a Malayalee organization called Geetamandalam, which was started, I think in 77 or something, which was sort of like a prayer group. You learned prayers in Malayalam and they talked about the Gita and so on. And I thought I didn't grew up in a religious family and I don't know any of this, but it didn't matter because I was in that environment. My children are not in that environment so they don't have the opportunity to absorb it the way I did and I don’t have the knowledge to impart to them.
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So I joined this group so maybe they would learn from this formal kind of Sundays education about this. And we would drive I think it was being held in Lombard or Brookfield or something like 45 minutes at least each way and these kids would get car sick along the way and **laughing** on the whole a totally miserable experience. They didn't want to go there because they both had motion sickness and then it was two hours there, and another-- it took your whole Sunday off, and on the whole was a failed experiment. But I did make a brief effort to actually connect them to my heritage. Then I think the fact that I was always wearing a sari was something-- they got it subconsciously, though this organized effort didn't succeed. They I think were subconsciously getting this message about their Heritage. I wore my sari everywhere without hesitation and for the first, I would say 14 years of life in this country at least. When we moved to Chicago, Chicago had the most severe winters ever on record and it was terrible and walking around in a sari and boots and then the wind would whip your sari up in your face and it became clear to me that this was not the most practical garment to wear in this weather.
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And then I noticed also that in the business world--this was another really interesting Insight I received--In Kentucky, in Lexington, Kentucky, a small town at the time with not any exposure, I would say other than the university, to the outside world--they are mostly people who come in from the mountains for treatment and the horse crowd--they really had very little awareness of customs and cultures outside their own Circle. So me, a saree wearing woman looking totally different, was fine, whatever I did was fine, because they assumed I am a foreigner and that's how foreigners are. So I was accepted the way I was. When we moved to Chicago, there were already so many Indians here. You no longer got excited at the sight of another Indian, you know, there were so many of them around. There was an expectation that you've been here so long why do you still continue to dress this way, are you trying to make a point of some kind? And this took me by surprise.
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I sensed this subtle sort of undercurrent about the way I dressed. And one of my husband's colleagues who was senior to him and his wife she liked me very much and I was very puzzled and I asked her, ‘People ask me where I'm from and when I say I'm from India they’re very nice, and then they say how long have you been here and I'll say 12 years or something and then I see a change in their expression, and I am trying to figure out why. And then she very kindly and openly told me, “I think they feel that, you know, you've been here this long and you’re still continuing to hold on to the ways of your country. Is that because you feel that you are better than we are? There are many factors at play that you probably are not aware of, but they have a sense that you're trying to make some kind of point.” And I said this is really interesting because the only point I’m making is **laughing** that I have a lot of saris and I like wearing them! And she said, “Yes, I can understand that, but there are people who don’t see things that way.” This was a major insight after moving into the Chicago area.
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[JJ]: This pressure to assimilate was it also from within the Indian community or outside the Indian Community?
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[LM]: The pressure to assimilate from outside the Indian community I think is primarily because it if you're in a business setting, and you're dealing with the public they don't want any distraction from what you’re there for. And so this is--I think the outside the Indian community’s pressure to assimilate comes from that. From within the Indian Community I think maybe there's a sense of “Oh, this one is just fresh off the boat, but I've been here so long, I know how to dress,” there may be some element of that. I can't say for sure but I'm thinking that perhaps there is a sense that one is the more westernized, one is the more quote, unquote advanced one is. And I fit right in, whereas so-and-so very much sticks out like a sore thumb because of the way she dresses or the way she behaves--some such sense of being unassimilated as being undesirable.
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But I wanted to tell you something about… Oh yes, I had drifted--kind of segued-- into the volunteer work I did. I started volunteering in in my in my neighborhood. Because of my children being motion sick **laughs** we never ventured very far from where we lived. So I pretty much made my life where I lived. And I would volunteer in the children schools, I was on the PTA board and I felt very much a part of the community. We lived in Highland Park, my husband worked at Highland Park Hospital, so that eventually anybody with a cardiac problem ended up seeing him, and anybody who went to the schools ended up seeing me because I would volunteer at the library. And I would volunteer in my sari and the kids had no problem with any of that. This was not an issue at all.
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One of the volunteer things I did was when the Indo-American Center was being formed. This was around 1989-1990 and one of the gentlemen there, Mr. M K G Pillay had asked me if I would help him with all the writing he needed doing, because he was approaching City officials, writing grants, so on and so forth. And then he asked my help to organize a program because he was very disturbed at how there was no Indian Representation in any of the media-- mainstream media. And so he asked me if I would help organize a program about how we can access mainstream media because Indian voices were just not being heard, let alone, represented.
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So I was able to get together a radio personality from WGN Radio, somebody from WBBM radio, then there was an Indian lady named Chitra Raghavan on WBEZ TV and a fourth, I forget who it was. Anyway there was a representation of mainstream media for a panel discussion and the gentleman from WGN made the point that they do not call people from India on their program when they are interviewing, because suppose--he said it is very much like when Jesse Jackson complains that nobody talks to him about the latest developments in automobiles that are coming, being only called for black issues. He said it’s the same kind of issue that we run into. Because if we put somebody from India on TV to talk about something other than something that’s happening in India right now, the viewer is distracted by the look of that person and the accent of that person and starts questioning how is he an expert on this issue, what is his background that he is suddenly an expert on--I don’t know, I’m not using his example, on say, the environment.
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They question the credentials because they're not used to seeing this person and that's why they don't have Indians coming in as part of the mainstream. I mean it’s sort of a chicken-or- the-egg situation, isn’t it? Because unless you have more Indians coming in, there will always be those questions. And fortunately we have evolved now that we do have Indians commenting on mainstream issues. But this was one of the-- You know--part of my volunteer work I do--where one issue of how we get represented was part of the questions that came up.
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[JJ]: Talk a little bit more about your work at the Indo-American Center. Were you volunteering for years?
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[LM]: Actually before that even I would say my volunteer work in the Indian Community started with a program called Chitrahar on TV. This was in the early 80s. There was a pioneering lady named Vichitra Nayyar whom I think of as the Oprah Winfrey of Indian Television, and she was a remarkable lady. She's no more. And she started this program and basically got together a group of us--and I call ourselves ‘housewives’ for want of a better word-- that she recruited to host a kind of a newsmagazine hour on TV. And so my my segment of that was usually interviewing people that's-- my involvement with the Indian Community I think probably began at that level. Then Mr. Pillay asked me to help out at the Indo-American Center and I started volunteering in-- he wanted help on various fronts. And one of his projects was, he was getting requests for presentations about India in schools.
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And so he asked me if I would develop a curriculum for what a presentation about India would be like and so I ended up talking to our local school teachers and all to see what information they were looking for and developed the curriculum and presented it to the Indo-American Center board. And they said oh this is good, now go ahead and start making this a regular program. And I I wasn't really trying to do that on my own--I’m pretty much a stay-at-home person. I don't mind working from home but I don't do a whole lot of stuff outside. And again as a stroke of luck, Mr. Pillay happened to run into a lady named Padma Rangaswamy and he said well she will be good, she can help you. And then Padma had this brilliant idea-- and then a lady named Shobhana Sanghvi who was on the Indo-American Center Board said Dorothie Shah is a teacher in the public schools, she can help you. So the three of us got together to start developing this program for the schools.
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And Padma had this brilliant idea that, you know, if you train volunteers. That's how our original thing was, that we would train volunteers to go into the schools. She said if we train volunteers then they move away or they lose interest and all this work that we put into it gets lost. Let's train the teachers. Because if you train the teachers you're reaching generations of students. And so this is how our work with the schools began and it ended up with Dorothie writing a grant for the Fulbright funding to take think it was 12 teachers –Padma took 12 teachers to India and they travelled 6 weeks there. And in return they had to develop curriculum for use in the CPS school system. So they, because they were part of the CPS school system they knew the requirements and they developed lesson plans. So this was I I think the seminal work we did over there, that we began to infiltrate the curriculum and students got to learn about India not as a separate self-contained unit on India.
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They were learning about the Indian kids in their classroom as part of the normal school day: in gym do a little bit of yoga, in language arts learn a little bit about the Panchatantra tales. So they became a part of the regular school day rather than one isolated unit on India and then India is dropped. I’ve always been for an approach that is not isolating. We are about reaching out to the rest of the society, not about this is us and we are staying this way. We don't isolate ourselves and that's very important to me. Maybe from my days of living as a child here and seeing how curious people here were about understanding us. I feel we have to build those bridges and build those connections primary education is starting from Montessori to first standard, we had several vernacular groups, classes, in between. So, for four years after Montessori, I was at a local Gujarati school, local Parsi school, primarily for girls. And, so they would that take boys until they were about 8 or 9 years of age and then we moved on to a boy’s school. And so, I was there at the Parsi school, our community school, close to where we lived, for four years till I was age of 8 or so. And then moved on to another same kind of school, missionary school, called the Don Bosco High School. St. John Don Bosco. And they had a school that was newly opened, when I first started there. And that's where I graduated from high school, we call that secondary school certificate, SSC, at that time. So, that is my earlier scholastic life. inaudible
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[JJ]: Very curious about your work with Chitrahar. Was that a local television station? Does someone stand out who you interviewed who later on had an impact on the community or you later on, maybe?’
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[LM]: Chitrahar had a tremendous impact on the community because it was the only Indian station in Chicago for sure. This is before cable, remember. So this was on Channel 26, and what Vichitra had done was buy an hour of of time there. And she was constantly looking for sponsors and rounding up Merchants to place ads, and it was it was a lifetime to to make this show a go. And then she organized an annual fundraiser called Chitrahar Night and developed what I called the Chitrahar model, which is to get all the kids around into some Act or the other on the program for Chitrahar night so the parents would buy tickets and then come to the show. And it worked! And Chitrahar night became a very big event, social event for the community. It was interesting, the power of television in those days.
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I still remember Vichitra telling me-- she had-- she was a very enterprising, energetic lady, a Dynamic lady who first started a small magazine called Indic. And her husband Inder was a structural engineer at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill which was a very famous architectural firm downtown and actually hired a lot of Indians--basically had its own role in Indian American history here. But one of the Pioneers at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill was Fazlur Rehman Khan who is from what is now Bangla Desh, but, he considered himself Indian because that’s when he was in this country and Vichitra told me that Fazlur Rehman Khan who was a colleague of Inder’s at Skidmore told her, “What are you doing with magazines? Television is where you should be!” And that inspired her to start this program. And it was a bunch of us volunteers who had interest in doing something but not committed to any career that took us out of our life with a nine-to-five position and then come back home-- then you wouldn't have time for these things.
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And it really opened a window into the life of the community in a different kind of way because it had-- it celebrated dance, it celebrated cooking it had an interview segment, it had a news from India segment, it had ties with the consulate where they ran some of the documentaries from Doordarshan… so it was a magazine format. It was a hodgepodge of things. It celebrated festivals----everything. For me, I got to interview some very prominent people whom I certainly would not have crossed paths with if it hadn't been for Chitrahar and I got to know people that I would not have come to know. Professor Chandrasekhar--the late Professor Chandrasekhar,I first met Sathyen Pitroda because of Chitrahar, I got to meet visiting dignitaries from India. We as Chitrahar media took a trip to Washington DC for Rajiv Gandhi's first visit to the United States.
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And it was it was remarkable. It was a wonderful experience. We had Indian officials from the consulate or from the Embassy, we had major performers from India --I can't think of names off the top of my head--Talat Aziz, Anoop Jalota, I can't think of the numbers of people who appeared on that show because those days visiting artists would stop in Chicago-- there was enough of an audience there for them and then one of the stops they would make was on Chitrahar.
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[JJ]: They would stop to be interviewed?
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[LM]: Interview or perform. And those video tapes are available (and off the Record)
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[JJ]: Where are they?
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[LM]: They are with Vichitra’s children, and they are talking to me about the possibility of our museum helping them digitize everything to preserve because they're not in a stable format right now. So we’re going to find out what the best way to do this is.
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[JJ]: it seems like a very obvious question the next one for you to answer, it’s what kind of impact do you think Indian Americans had on America, but specifically in Chicago?
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[LM]: I wonder if before I get into that I could tell you next how did National Indo-American Museum evolved? Out of the Indo-American Center, when Padma and Dorothie and I--we were part of the Heritage Education Committee of the Indo-American Center and we had been on its Board for quite some time. In fact Padma and I had also served as presidents of the institution. And we put together this book which was a pictorial history of the community which was published by Arcadia Publishing as part of its Spotlight on America Series where they Highlight different communities. And Padma is the historian among us.
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The three of us-- actually there used to be an executive director at the Indo-American Center, Mr. Rajan, who would call us the three-legged stool of the Indo-American Center **laughs** because we were kind of there doing that all purpose kind of stuff. Dorothie, with her education experience being a world history teacher at Evanston Township High School, Padma of course is a scholar with her PhD, in Indian American history and I saw myself as the lay person who approaches everything from the point of view of “but wait I don't understand that, will you please explain it to me?” So I brought that perspective to this august duo. And we had started to --Padma been approached to put this pictorial history together and her vision has always been to include the community in everything. And so we decided that we would put an appeal out to the community to submit documents and pictures through which we could tell the story and the history of the community in Chicago.
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During the course of that we ran into so many people who said, “Oh you know I moved out of my house, I threw out all those things that I knew,” “I had so many documents I could have shown you but I cleared out everything,” “I have so many old pictures I just got rid of everything,” “You should have talked to so-and-so but he died last year.” We kept running into that and at some point –we were just dismayed. We were happy that we were getting what we did, but the loss struck us tremendously. And one day, contemplating all this while we were working on this book, Padma said “We just have to create a museum. We can’t keep losing stuff like this.” And out of those words I would say what became the into American Heritage Museum was born. What happened was we were all on the Indo-American Center Board and we told the Board about our real concern about our heritage and our history going down the tubes and the board sanctioned us with the mandate to create some sort of Museum that would preserve the story. And with that the Heritage Education committee formed a separate Committee of the museum.
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So from Padma, Dorothie and I, we expanded the group to others who might be of interest to form a committee and that included board members from the museum--I mean---Indo- American Center who were interested Like Shobhana Sanghvi and Bapu Arekapudi, and Ann Lata Kalayil Ralph Nicholas-- these were all and then outside the Indo-American Center board there was Happie Datt, Nafisa and Mannan Bandukwala. There were a bunch of us who formed that first committee to research how a museum could be set up. And then we talked to people in the field and outside the field to get an idea. We talked to what was called then the Mexican Fine Arts Museum and we talked to Dipak Jain who was Dean at Northwestern Kellogg School of Business, we talked to community leaders, we held focus Groups. Out of all this came the idea that this Museum-- there had been an initial idea that there would be a South Asian Museum.
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But talking to these people, especially Dipak Jain and the Mexican Fine Arts Museum, we came away with, from their experience, the understanding that it was best to focus small and expand later. The Mexican Fine Arts Museum said there’s such a huge Latino population, but we did not feel we could represent everybody correctly even though we would want to, and we decided that we were more effective staying focused on one story, and then we can connect to the others. Dipak Jain had a very practical experience in that there was something called an India Business Forum or something at Northwestern University and that called in Chamber of Commerce from India and various entities to see-India was opening up for business and Northwestern School of Business was looking at ways to enhance that.
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And it was very very successful. It drew in industry leaders from this country and India. And seeing how successful that was, Northwestern thought they should expand it to Asia Business Forum. And so they tried running it and found it didn't work. Because it expanded to the Philippines, to Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and I think China was there, anyway a much larger--Japan-- group of countries. And it was too diffuse. Nobody took ownership. It seemed to have lost focus. So we thought this is good practical advice and that's how we started being just an Indian American story that we were going to work on and represent.
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[JJ]: Was it born out of IAC, was it still under Indo-American Center or was it independent?
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[LM]: It started out as the committee for forming the museum, then once the museum was formed we were--what is it called?--the Indo-American Center was the fiscal sponsor of the Indo-American Heritage Museum. And the Indo-American Center made a strategic plan that made the course of the Center one that focused on delivering social services and the cultural and Heritage aspect of it was given to the museum side. And from being a fiscal sponsor of the museum we eventually in 2008 developed our own 501 c 3 and became our own free-standing entity. But thanks to the Center’s benevolence we continue to have that as our place of operations.
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[JJ]: So going back to my last question, actually my previous question, what kind of impact do you think the Indian American community has had in America and specifically in Chicago?
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[LM]: The impact of the Indian American community in Chicago and in America is something that I think has just evolved as a function of the way globalization has evolved. Because it used to be there was India, and there was America, and there was a little bit of back-and-forth between. And India's impact on America was probably more in terms of the philosophy and Gandhiji, and Vedanta. It was more among certain limited circles that there was any kind of awareness or impact. Of course universities always, always universities. Because from my research for the National Indo-American Museum I learned that even back in the eighteen hundreds there were students coming from India to this country to learn. So there was a back-and-forth that always existed. But in terms of impact in those days it was so little because the numbers were so few.
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But as the population increased and the University students started working here and continuing to live here, I think--and then it became-- it made commercial sense to cater to that number, I think that's when you start noticing the impact. Because once your numbers increase and there's a critical mass, then industries develop to serve that critical mass. So and then you begin to see how it sort of just kind of seeps into the general awareness and now nobody is that surprised if they see a brown face behind the counter or at the toll booth and of course definitely nobody’s surprised to see a brown face at the operating table or in a dentist's office or in the doctor's office. So I feel like there is an impact in that we have become absorbed into the mainstream in that way, that nobody's questioning as much anymore that who are you and why you're here. Though that is counter to another prevailing and newer kind of impact which is why are you here, why aren't you back in your own country. So there is a kind of tug-of-war between these two forces right now. This is a relatively new phenomenon, I would say.
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[JJ]: So we know now a lot about your origins and your work here in the community. What do you like doing in your personal free time, your leisure time.
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[LM]: What would I what?
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[JJ]: What do you do in your leisure time? Are there any hobbies?
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[LM]: well I used to do a lot of weaving I kind of left it off now. I joined a weaving group here in Lake Forest. That in a way put me, not knowingly, but I realize it puts me back in touch with my heritage. Because until I started weaving along with all these white ladies, I had no idea of how complex and demanding making a sari was. You know, I mean it's incredible the amount of work that goes into it! And I began to have a much larger appreciation for the textiles of my homeland and how how fabulous an art and a craft that was, and I hope it continues to live on. I spend my time reading, I like going for walks and and I love what I do at the National Indo-American Museum, because I think from my earliest days I have always enjoyed connecting with people who are not like I am, and trying to understand what their lives are about, and in the process maybe they come to understand something about my life too--I enjoy that.
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[JJ]: I figure that maybe Literature was like a common bind--like--where you would kind of--do you still keep in touch with Indian literature or maybe literature in general, is that something that you…?
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[LM]: Yes, I I mean I like reading. I like to –I can’t say that I have an academic interest anymore in literature and sadly I am not fluent enough to read or write any Indian language. This is a huge lack in my education because having grown up here and there and then majored in English literature I don't have that. And so I do try to read Indian literature in translation whenever I have a chance, and I like reading Indian American authors because they do have a very special relevance to our lives here. now.
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[JJ]: All right I thank you very much Lakshmi for bearing with me through all these questions.
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[LM]: **laughing** Oh, thank you for bearing with me Jitesh!
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[JJ]: All right. This concludes our interview for the Oral History Project for the National Indo-American Museum. Thank you.