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You have been conferred the prestigious Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award. Personally, what does it mean to you?
Well I am touched, humbled and grateful. I have such deep love for my country. It is a recognition of the fact that I have been able to balance between my janmabhoomi and my karmabhoomi. I am proud of where I am today, of the opportunities that I received in America, what I have been able to do with those opportunities. While making the best of those opportunities, I have never even for a day forgotten where my foundations are, which is right here in India. The Samman has honestly moved me in ways that I did not think of.
One of the contributions mentioned in the PBSA citation is that you have supported India’s causes and concerns in a tangible way, and you have built closers links between India and the USA and the overseas Indian community. Give us an example of this…
Obviously, first of all, being a very public figure, you have to carry yourself always with pride and honour. There is never a forum where I speak, where I do not portray myself proudly as an Indian American. I am proud of this being one, and people know that I am from India. I am proud of being Indian. I give credit to where I am today to my principles and to my learning here. Also, while I was with the University of South Florida at Tampa before joining UH, I was instrumental in establishing the India Studies Centre. It stemmed from my belief that people need to know that India is more than just a land of snakes and snake charmers. It is a country of the future, a nation where technology is moving things forward, and making things possible. It is a hub of green power and innovation. It is a nation with imagination. Through the Indian Studies Centre, I was able to offer courses on India for better understanding of the country. At the University of Houston, I have already established a programme for bringing students to India every year. I had brought 30 UH graduates to India one year, and majority of them are today CEOs and successful people. I speak for India at almost every public platform. I am very proud of the Indian education system, and I said this at the FICCI lecture as well, that the test of a system is not what it does to you when you are there, but what it does to you when you are out of it. The fact that I was able to succeed in a totally foreign system with so many barriers is a tribute to my Indian education. I am proud of the culture back at home, back in my town, and grateful to my mother and grandmother. I can see in my day-to-day life as a CEO that when I approach a certain issue, shape policy, I am doing things exactly the way I saw my mother handling things, and my extended family. Three years ago, I wrote a piece in Hindi titled Meri Maa Ke Naam. It was published here in Sarita magazine. Then it was picked up and translated in English, then it was printed in India Abroad. It was subsequently picked up from there by mainstream American newspapers and published on Mother’s Day. That piece is about my relationship with my mother. I wrote it in Hindi. I try to keep my Hindi intact, a language in which I write fiction and poetry as well.
The PBSA is given for eminence is one’s field or outstanding work that has enhanced India’s prestige in the country of residence. Kindly throw light on your tenure as President of UH, and the work that you’ve been able to do…
I became president of University of Houston in 2008. Prior to that I was, for 22 years, at the University of South Florida where I started in a temporary position, before rising to become a senior VP. During the past six years at UH, the university has transformed into becoming one of the top 100 institutions in the USA. I was the first Indian born to become presient of any research university in America, male or female. Now, there are five other Indian presidents. When I was appointed, I had had nobody to follow. There were lots of eyes on me, and if anything were to go wrong, they were going to blame and where I came from, that too in a challenging place like Texas. But I am a very goal-oriented person. I put my passion behind my goals. I just don’t negotiate on my goals. I try from every angle to reach my goal. And I’d like to think that’s how I have gone about things at UH in the last six years. I became the first India born president at Houston, but when I went to that city, there were already 150,000 Indians living there. They are doing tremendous work, and are very successful people. So we already had the foundation in terms of a community that is entrepreneurial. My going there was just one added element to this.
There would be other aspects to that eminence as well…
Yes. Right now, since January 1, 2014, I am the deputy chairperson of the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas. Hardly any university president ends up doing that kind of work, and being deputy chairman brings with a lot of attention and focus. I have also been elected as the Incoming Chair of the American Council on Education, the national body of all educational universities in the USA. The board includes chairmen of different universities. This too will make me the first Indian born to be chairing this. I am the first woman chancellor in Texas, American or Indian. I am a board member of the Indo American Chamber of Commerce. If it has anything to do with the Indian cause, I try to give myself to the full extent possible.
As a long-time member of the Indian Prime Minister’s Global Advisory Council on Overseas Indians, what kind of initiatives have you recommended to enhance and improve India’s engagement with overseas Indians?
All members of the PM’s GAC bring in their own expertise. My expertise is in the education sector. I am always focused on education, and that has been my focus over the last five years at the GAC. This time I made a few recommendations. One of them is—and this is something I’ve been saying for some time—that we really need to bring in a culture of research and innovation in India. Even the best of institutions do not have that deep-seated, intuitive, culture of research, and innovation. When I say innovation, I mean that when you discover, for example, drugs, you take that and put it in the marketplace so that as a product it immediately starts to benefit and impact society. Such a culture attracts the best of talents and keeps such talent
excited.
Secondly, the private sector and the industrial sector need to come in and help the public sector to build universities with their charity, philanthropy and expertise. It would take a lot many years for the private universities to become world class universities, simply because the volumes they cater to are low, and, therefore, the impact on the general population is limited. But look at this way, if a major public university can be turned into a world class one, it would impact a very large number of people. The University of Houston is a public university, but each year I raise 100 million dollars from private industry. Each year it goes into strengthening the kind of faculty that I can bring in, the kind of support I can provide to students, the kind of research programmes we can have, the laboratories we can build. Without that kind of support, I do not think the UH could have become a Tier I university. So once the private sector can come on board, the results are phenomenal, and that is how I strongly believe public institutions can become better.
Thirdly, I feel that there are a lot of educators out in the USA who are sitting there with lots of emotional attachment, and professional expertise. Definitely there should be a way where India can use modern technology to build a creative environment whereby good people get tied back to India. You may not get them to leave their country of work, or to be permanently back here in India. May be some will come, some won’t. But there has to be a way in today’s globally connected world for them to become part of building India’s education sector.
Does the UH have academic or research partnerships with Indian institutions?
We have partnerships with many universities in India. Many of them are educational partnerships, many of them are research partnerships. But just because there isn’t a deep-seated culture of research here, and there isn’t so much of research money available to professors, those research partnerships have not materialized to the extent that there is a potential. But yes there are many research partnerships and many education partnerships where there are joint programmes, joint degree programmes, bringing students to America for their PhD so that they can come back to India as professors. We have partnerships with several IITs, with the Benaras Hindu University, with Delhi University, and many others. For instance, we do huge work with the DU’s mathematics department, we have a PhD programme. With many of the petroleum engineering institutes, we have joint programmes.
You are UH System’s first woman chancellor, the University’s first foreign-born president and the first Indian immigrant to head a comprehensive research university in the U.S. It speaks something about the USA being a country of equal opportunities, doesn’t it?
Yes. It does. It absolutely does. There is something about the environment there that allows you to be judged on your merit. If I could do all this, it speaks volumes. It doesn’t however mean that life is fair all the time. In no place is life fair all the time. So I always knew I am a woman, an international one, I have a different accent than anybody else. I have those three strikes against me, and I always knew that I’ve to work 10 per cent harder for each of those strikes. So, from the very beginning I had to work at 130 per cent to be noticed as 100 per cent. That has been my paradigm basically. So even if things happened to me where I felt that it wasn’t really fair, I never allowed any of those external things to really make me feel like a victim. I always felt that if you are going to hurt me, I am going to try thrice as hard to achieve my goals.
Every time I’ve faced any barrier, or any setback in life, I’ve challenged myself to work even harder, rather than sit back and just cry over it. And that is what I keep telling the youth today, that I do not know one person you consider your role model—I don’t care who that person may be—that has reached there without any failures in life.
They have been bankrupt, they have failed in their businesses before, they have failed in their elections before, and the reason they are there is not because they failed, but because each time they failed, they got up, learnt their lessons, and moved again. I say that is what you need to remember. Never be discouraged by failure, and never let any setback make you feel like a victim. Because then the whole victim mentality will give you negative energy. You have to think you will not allow yourself to be victimized.
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