What’s the Secret Sauce of Their Success?
Indians in the U.S. have enjoyed success in numbers far exceeding their small percentage of the population. In her book, Indian Genius, author Meenakshi Ahamed profiles sixteen trailblazers to discover why that is so. We interview Ahamed to dig deeper into her findings.
On the cover of Meenakshi Ahamed's book Indian Genius: The Meteoric Rise of Indians in America, we see the beaming faces of 16 distinguished persons, presented as if they are sitting side-by-side for a class portrait. It’s a frame that defines Indian American success!
Amongst the luminaries gracing the cover are demigods of the tech world—Kanwal Rekhi, Vinod Khosla, Shantanu Narayen, Satya Nadella, Suhas Patil, and Nikesh Arora. Others are: America’s favorite new-age guru, Dr. Deepak Chopra; Grammy-winning musician and business dynamo, Chandrika Tandon; renowned media pundit, Fareed Zakaria; former U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy; Congressman Ro Khanna; former U.S. Ambassador to the UN as well as former Governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley; former Principal Deputy Solicitor General of the United States, Neal Katyal; and the noted doctor-writers: Abraham Verghese, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Atul Gawande.
Together, they represent an avalanche of talent, initiative, hard work, titles, power, and wealth. More importantly, they represent a community that, according to the U.S. Census data, ranks the highest in education level and household income compared to all other demographic groups, including white Americans. At barely over one percent of the total population, Indian- Americans make up for upwards of six percent of physicians, and own over 40 percent of economy hotels and an outsized percentage (relative to their population) of retail businesses. From academia and corporate America to politics, Indian Americans are increasingly making it to the top echelons in numbers that far outpace their relative size as a demographic group. In pop culture, too, perhaps what can be considered the last frontier of assimilation, they are making their presence felt—in TV shows, movies, music, and more.
What gives? How is it that immigrants from a country that was, until the recent past, a poor Third World nation, come to America and write one of the most amazing and inspiring sagas of communal success?
Meenakshi Ahamed, author of Indian Genius, is herself a member of the “$8 Club” of immigrants who came to America decades ago with just eight dollars in their pocket and, in just a decade or two, ended up with fancy suburban mansions and children going to Ivy League colleges.
Through her decades in America, Ahamed has astutely observed life from the vantage point of the two countries. She was born in Calcutta and came here as a student, eventually getting an MA from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She has worked at the World Bank and for NDTV. Last year, she published A Matter of Trust: India-US Relations from Truman to Trump, which the New York Times described as an “exquisitely written, thoroughly researched and insightful account of the twists and turns in the 75-year relationship between India and the United States.”
Now, in Indian Genius, she takes on a more personal topic, exploring the phenomenon of Indian American success. Although Ahamed does not credit classic Indian values as the sole elixir for their American success, she does point out how values of hard work, resilience, and persistence have been drummed into us by our parents from childhood.
A collective quality
Intrigued by the title of her book, I asked her: Is there such a thing as “Indian genius”? What does it really mean? “First, you have to define what genius means. When you talk about American exceptionalism, what is the genius of the American people? What is the genius of the Chinese people? [My book] is really about the genius of the Indians. It's a collective genius,” said Ahamed. “These Indians not only rose to the top, but they also did it in one generation. There's a genius in their culture. So, it's more about the genius of the people than the individuals, and that is what the book title implies. It's the genius of the Indian people to be able to succeed in another country, in another culture.”
Dissecting success: Comfort with competition and jugaad
Ahamed highlights the intense competition that Indians grew up in. “When you live in a country of 1.5 billion people, competition is ingrained in you. You're competing for everything from day one: seats in schools and universities, electricity connections, gas connections, etc. So, when you come here, you know how to compete.”
Speaking about how she chose the people profiled in the book, she said, “Of course, the list is subjective. I didn't pick them [simply based on wealth]. I wanted to see whether someone had an impact in the community on their way up.”
She picked specific areas where Indians have had a transformational effect in America and have taken significant risks to make that possible. “I wanted to find people who had moved the needle in some way, and I zeroed in on technology, medicine, public policy, and leadership.” Rather than make a laundry list of everyone in these categories, she zoned in on five people in each category, so readers could get to know their unique stories, often in their own words, sharing interesting anecdotes from their lives, how they overcame obstacles, and their secrets to success.
Kanwal Rekhi grew up poor in a crowded home without a running toilet. Yet he went on to become the “godfather” of the Indian tech community in Silicon Valley. Ahamed writes, “Many Indian-Americans recognize that he paved the way for them, breaking several glass ceilings to achieve success. Along the way, he had to endure cultural biases and professional inequity.” His company, Excelan, was the first fully Indian American-owned company to go public when it was listed on the Nasdaq in 1987. As Rekhi has said, “Indians in the Valley did not look at Bill Gates and imagine they could become him. But when they saw me, another Indian, run a company and go public with it, it inspired them. They felt, ‘If he can do it, why not me?’”
At that time, Indians had few mentors to guide them, but as more Indians got into tech startups, Rekhi collaborated with these new bold adventurers to start The Indus Entrepreneurs (TIE), a professional organization to help fund and incubate the new startups created by the many Indians entering Silicon Valley. Today, TIE has 61 chapters across 14 countries and 15,000 charter members.
Suhas Patil of Cirrus Logic, a fabless semiconductor company, remembers that even as a child, he was blessed with an ample dose of jugaad, the quintessential Indian quality loosely defined as “frugal innovation, where individuals find inventive and often makeshift solutions to problems using available resources.” Patil grew up building projects from cardboard, metal scrap, and wood. “I had an insight while I was in high school that electronics had legs, and, as a field, had room for growth, so I decided to apply to college in engineering, but I was too young to attend, so I went to Xaviers where I learned English.” However, thanks to his IIT education, he got into MIT on a full scholarship.
IITs: India’s “gift” to the Silicon Valley
The one thing that perhaps Indians do have is the wonderful gift of a stellar education from the government-subsidized Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). The several branches of IIT spread across the country are top-notch. They are much harder to get into than even Harvard or Yale. Only the brightest of the bright manage to get into these highly competitive institutions. They give students such a solid background that they can take all the punishing schedules of Ivy League colleges because they have already been through the fire.
As venture capitalist Vinod Khosla explained to Ahamed, “Getting into IIT was the only way to escape whatever was your lot in society. Everyone knew it was a fair playing field—there was no ability to use influence. No one doubted that it was a totally performance-based institute. It became a brand of excellence that people took pride in associating with.”
Kanwal Rekhi, Suhas Patil, and Vinod Khosla—all IIT graduates—were part of the first tech wave, which helped them create products and lead successful tech companies.
In an interview in the book, Khosla identified the traits of those first wave of graduates from IIT who came to America: “It takes a certain kind of personality. Smarts are not enough. Education is not enough. You had to have a risk-taking entrepreneurial culture to leave the comfort of home and come to this country, not knowing anybody. There wasn’t anybody I knew here. There was no mentor. But this willingness to take risks, along with lots of capability, is a combination that works well for Indians in Silicon Valley, where it is about performance. It’s not just a place; it’s a mindset.”
Asked if he always wanted to be his own boss, Khosla responded: “I was clear [that] I was coming to the United States to start a company. I was never coming here just to get a job. What makes me happy are the things I’ve pursued. This internal drive to do things motivates me, not titles, promotions, income, cars, and bigger houses.”
Ahamed gives high marks to both Shantanu Narayen of Adobe and Satya Nadella of Microsoft for being exceptional leaders “who have had a transformational impact on their companies by changing the existing models they were being run on and developing a vision for their futures. They stand out as visionary CEOs who have grasped the new frontier that is changing the world with artificial intelligence and are well-positioned to lead their companies to the next growth phase.
Transformational leaders
In her definition of Indian genius, Ahamed is intrigued by the transformational aspect of these leaders. She talks of Dr. Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto, which lists very simple things that hospitals should do to prevent infections, and it helped bring infection rates down across the board all over the U.S. by a phenomenal 60 percent. “He had what I would call a transformative impact on society and medicine.
Gawande’s second transformational idea was about end-of-life decisions. His book, Being Mortal, was somewhat based on and inspired by his father's death.” Doctors are bent on prolonging life at any cost, and 90 percent of healthcare costs in this country are in the last year or two years of a patient’s life. “You have to weigh prolonged life against what the patient wants,” says Ahamed about Gawande’s beliefs outlined in his book. “So, I think it was a transformational idea which had a big impact on the medical community and Americans who hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about the alternative to prolonged care, [that] maybe hospice care can be an alternative.”
Dr. Abraham Verghese’s work and writing had a similar effect during the AIDS crisis, and Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee has been a transformative changemaker in the fight against cancer.
Ahamed points out the transformational qualities of each person she interviewed in the book, from Nadella to Neal Katyal. Nadella made Microsoft one of the most profitable companies on the planet, pushing its market value to hit 3 trillion dollars at one time. She says he is a visionary who knew what he was doing and stabilized the market.
She counts Chandrika Tandon among the Indian Genius list for her bold actions, jugaad, and risk- taking in her own life and work—from taking charge of her life by going on a hunger strike to go to the college of her choice to being only one of eight women in an-all male engineering school to becoming the first South Asian female partner in the prestigious firm of McKinsey where she interviewed in a sari and chappals. She took the major risk of starting her own company, Tandon Capital Associates, when few women were CEOs. She made millions for her corporate clients and herself by astute restructuring of companies. Tandon then pursued her creative passion with the same spirit of adventure, reaching the heights of a major ensemble performance at the Kennedy Center. Her album, Triveni, won the prestigious Grammy Award for Best New Age Album.
Along with education and philanthropy, Tandon has adroitly juggled all these balls in the air. She says, “When you don’t look at boundaries, everything seems connected. Everything seems possible.”
Whether it was the iconic Deepak Chopra who transformed meditation from its perception as a quirky Indian ritual to a mainstream very-American habit, or Fareed Zakaria who made the Indian American voice as the one to be heard and valued in political commentary all over the world, each of them helped change the way Americans think and react to the world. Ahamed says of Zakaria, “All of a sudden, everyone from Dubai to Delhi to Des Moines in Iowa was listening to him, and he was giving them a slightly different interpretation of the news and world events. He's been quite transformational in how the news is presented, and people trust him.”
In the face-to-face interviews with all these super-achievers, Ahamed gleaned many of their secrets for success, risk-taking, and dealing with failure. These are valuable insights for those wanting to duplicate their success or at least get some ideas on how to jumpstart their own careers.
In the past, only the best of the best from India were able to come because of entry restrictions. Later, with the Family Reunification Act, suddenly, a wave of less educated Indian immigrants came in. So, is the Indian genius something inherent in the blood? Is it something that may not exist for these people who did not attend Ivy League schools or live in swanky neighborhoods?
I asked Ahamed about this, and she agreed that Indians are striving and doing very well. She says, “The number of Indians coming in with a STEM education has certainly made Indians very successful in this country. But whether that leads to genius, I would like to reserve judgment on that.”
She gave the example of the Spelling Bee competitions, where Indian American children have been phenomenal, and the amount of work parents and children put into it is considerable and commendable. She kept a comprehensive chart of Spelling Bee participants, and while many went on to become doctors and engineers, they were not on the genius track. Winning the Spelling Bee competition led them to perfectly respectable careers but did not lead to, say, CEO of Microsoft, she said.
I asked Ahamed for her reading of the future of Indian genius in America. Now, with major changes coming under Trump, what does she see in the tea leaves, especially with all the immigration restrictions? She believes immigration will be harder and people will have more trouble acquiring legal status here, but she is hopeful for people already here. “There's always room for excellence, no matter where you are,” she says. “If you have remarkable abilities, are smart, and have something society wants, there will always be avenues to succeed. I think that will not change.”
She believes that what is so great about this country is that every one of us has someone in the family who has immigrated from somewhere: “That is the connective tissue that joins us all, and this is something we ought to celebrate. That is something we ought to hold hands on and be proud of. Every wave of immigrants has contributed to this country, and Indians are the most recent. Each one of us, and our ancestors, have contributed towards the American story. So, we should be celebrating that.”
Lavina Melwani is a New York-based journalist who writes for several international publications and blogs at Lassi with Lavina.
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