My folks and I moved to the US in 2011 with the $200 that we borrowed from my mom’s uncle and our hearts and minds full of excitement, fear, happiness and tons of uncertainty.
Imagine the scene from the movie Titanic where Jack and his buddy won tickets from some travelers who were dumb/smart enough to gamble with it before departure. Imagine the excitement they had when they won the tickets and realized that they are going to ‘Americuh!’; That’s the sort of excitement we had. My mom’s sister and brother-in-law sponsored our US visa application in 1998. We had to completely forget about ever moving to the US after the horrific incidents of 9/11/2001, since everything, including visa processing had become complicated, to say the least. Post 2008, I didn’t even want to come to the US. Heard that my cousin who graduated from an Ivy league was having a difficult time finding a job(she was trying for a very specific job with her high qualifications, unlike me who just wanted any entry level job)… what was I going to do? Flip burgers with my half-assed mechanical engineering degree? I couldn’t even find a job I could be good at and stick to in India, how was I going to compete with the cream of the crop in a foreign country?
In 2008, in what was the worst time to graduate since the great depression of 1929, I graduated with a mechanical engineering degree from a not so Ivy league type of school. Although, it was a really well funded Christian minority institution, (located in the foothills of the Siruvani, on the out-skirts of Coimbatore, a city in southern India), I wasn’t exactly top of the class so to speak. I was happy with my 70% grades through out my schooling. I graduated with 70% from my 10th grade. Around 70% in my 12th grade and let’s just say about 70% (65.3%) from my undergrad. Many who got in were able to get into that college either because they were really smart or were able to pay the huge donations they had to give to get in. I just got ‘lucky’ or ‘blessed’, however you want to put it. I heard the guy who got in front of me had to pay a few lakhs(100,000s) to get in, so did the guy after me. My mom could only afford around 1500 rupees, which was all the money she had in her purse(and bank) at the time. The admissions officer decided that I’d be a good fit for mechanical engineering. I wanted to get into IT just because I thought after being in a boys only catholic school for 12 years, it was time to live beside the other half of humanity, females. But he said only girls take IT and he wanted to fill in seats for mechanical engineering. So mechanical engineering it was! And mechanical engineering was an extended version of a boys only school, no females.
After almost 18 months of struggling to find a job, quitting and rejoining a low paying job at a car dealership and part timing at call centers, I got a job at a wind energy company as a field engineer. It was another version of an all boys high school, just more dangerous and secluded from but all of humanity, not just females.
The wind farms I worked in in late 2009 and early 2010 were pretty much in remote villages and towns. They had some of the best views, sun rises and sun sets the world could ever offer while I naively risked my life around high voltage, heights and confined spaces that could crush me to death. Still.. no females.
In 2010, we got a mail from the US embassy in Chennai, India. They wanted a bunch of documents from us to start the application process. I was working in a wind energy plant in Sri Lanka at the time. I had to take a break and return home to help my parents with the visa application and interview preparation. It took us over 8 months including travelling to all the places we lived in to get police verification certificates and other documents needed to start the application process. In early 2011, we had our visa interviews and I’d say 9 out of the 10 people got rejected that day. I saw many them walking out in tears that day; they probably had to go through years of waiting and waiting and preparing to get to this point to only be rejected. We were one of the lucky/blessed ones to get through.
Both my parents were teachers in a catholic high school, my dad taught art for all the grades, while my mom taught biology for grades 6th through 10th. I think they earned about 8000 rupees(~$110/mo) at the highest point in their career at that school after almost two decades of teaching there. The horse barn converted ‘1 BHK’ rental housing units we lived in for 18 years leaked in the front room , kitchen and bathrooms when it rained. I remember we always lived pay check to check and depended on occasional donations from my grandparents and aunt from the US to bail us out from some of the debt my dad kept getting us into. My dad was trying to get us a better life, but he kept getting into bad business deals. He was a very talented artist and he finally published one book that sold really well, but his business partner swindled the profits and disappeared leaving us in over 200,000 rupees of debt. At the rate at which they were earning at the time, it would take us over 30 years to pay it off. Not sure how we got out of it but I’m guessing my grandparents and aunt from the US helped us out a bit.
Since 2011, It took me 4 years of financial difficulties and unhappiness to make up my mind that I definitely needed to do something out of the box to ensure my life would be better off. I decided I need to get into a really good school.. to get into a good school like Wharton, I need to do something inspirational, almost record setting. So I decide, what do I love doing? Just driving around. So might as well drive around the US… wait, why I don’t I drive through all 48 states and fly to Hawaii and Alaska? I’m thinking if I couch surf, I can stick to my budget of $50 per state including food, fuel and accommodation. So that’s about $2500 that I’d need before tickets to Hawaii and Alaska. Worst case scenario I would need twice that amount if something goes wrong was what I thought. I don’t have 5 grand.. I lived pay check to pay check. . I drew my route on a map, cashed out my 401k, and put some clothes and some water in my trusty little Honda and started driving.
Almost 5 years since the journey began and led to several life changing decisions, I now look back and think, the thing that I was trying to run away from, never left me. It was me.
50 states 50 food banks 