The life of Rajee Ramachandran was a parallel of opposites with the life of Prabhu Goel. One had a life of opportunity that included a PhD at Carnegie Mellon. The other had a life of limitations, including no money for college tuition. Yet, the lives of two strangers, 9,000 miles apart, would intertwine.
The bangles are much more than expensive Indian jewelry. In traditional Hindu culture, the bracelets are treasured symbols of marriage, often passed on from generation to generation. Inexplicably, though, one particular wife and mother has stopped wearing her 12K gold bangles. Family and friends notice almost immediately and ask why. She explains that she realized she is allergic to gold and can't wear them anymore. But her 17-year-old daughter, Rajee Ramachandran, knows better—the bangles are gathering dust in a pawn shop in Chennai, India, collateral on a loan.
Rajee's mom has done the unthinkable to try and keep alive her three daughters' chance at a better life—a chance that realistically they could only get with a college education, something she wasn't able to get when she was growing up. Rajee is astute enough to understand the sacrifice her mother has made. She vows to herself that someday, somehow, she'll find a way to return the bangles to her mom.
Until 1994, just two years ago, there was no hint that she would need to make such a vow. She lived a relatively comfortable life with her parents, two sisters, and grandmother in a one-bedroom apartment in Chennai. It was just 600-square-feet, plus a balcony—not much bigger than most hotel rooms—but in a city of more than 4,000,000 people, located in a country racing toward a population of one billion, the living conditions for the Ramachandran family weren't unusual. And because Rajee's dad had a steady job, the family could afford the necessities: rice and yogurt to eat each day; brightly colored saris to wear on festive occasions; insulin for Rajee's mom, who has type 2 diabetes; and tuition for Rajee and her sisters so they could attend high schools that, unlike the public schools—attended only by the poorest in India—offered an education that prepared students for college.
The modest, typical life ended abruptly when Rajee's dad came home with some news. After 14 years with the Western Transport Agency, after rising up through the ranks to become a regional manager despite no college degree, he was unexpectedly laid off. In the months that followed, he struggled to find work, always competing with younger, more educated candidates.
To pay down the family's mounting debt, he sold the family's apartment and they moved into an even tinier place—just 400-square-feet and no balcony. He couldn't tap into his retirement savings to fill the income gap. Unscrupulous money market fund managers picked it clean, along with the savings of thousands of other duped investors in India. The scandal eventually sparked the government to enact India's first depositor-protection law. But that was of little consolation to the Ramachandran family. Their money was gone.
To pay the bills, including her daughters' high school tuition, Rajee's mom took her first job outside of the household, teaching Hindi at a nearby grade school. To earn more money, she cooked meals for a family friend. But all her hard work wasn't enough. That's when she decided to pawn her beloved bangles, as well as the necklaces and earrings she had received as wedding gifts.
Rajee had been doing her best to chip in by tutoring Hindi, math, and science to area school children. The rest of the time she studied. "I didn't know what I would be doing [in the future], but I thought the only way to get off of the place that we were in was to study, and study hard. So I used to put in all my efforts into making sure I had good grades."
By the time Rajee graduates from high school, her hard work has paid off. She is accepted into Regional Engineering College in Rourkela, about 700 miles north of Chennai, to study metallurgical engineering. She knows she will find a good job after graduating from there because all of the top companies extensively recruit REC graduates.
But just a few months shy of enrolling, with her father still unemployed, she realizes her family can't pay the tuition. And, unlike the United States, there are essentially no financial aid packages available. It looks like her future won't be at REC; instead she wonders if she should accept a job offer to teach Bharatanatyam dance to children. At least she can help pay the family bills, maybe even save enough so her younger sisters won't have to worry about their college tuition.
Growing up near New Delhi, India, Prabhu Goel knew students like Rajee. He had gone to high school with them—bright, hardworking classmates who had the potential to be doctors, engineers, architects—if only they could afford college. In reality, he knew they would never have that opportunity, never be able to break free from the shackles binding them to a life of low-wage, menial jobs.
But that memory gets buried in some forgotten corner of his mind once he sets foot on Carnegie Mellon University's campus in 1970. He's excited to be in the United States for the first time, but he's more excited to get started working toward his PhD in electrical engineering, courtesy of a research assistantship that will pay his expenses. At Carnegie Mellon, Goel discovers an interdisciplinary environment that allows engineers to collaborate with the computer science faculty. The mix is an ideal fit for his research interests—developing software to improve computer chip manufacturing, a pursuit he began as an undergraduate at the India Institute of Technology in Kanpur, where he graduated at the top of his class.
At the end of his first year, Goel is offered a summer internship with IBM when a classmate backs out at the last minute. He seizes the opportunity, impresses his supervisors, and parlays that into two more summer internships there. By the time he earns his PhD in 1974, IBM has hired him as a development engineer. During the next nine years at Big Blue in New York, Goel earns four patents and several company awards for his chip automation work, including the company's top prize for outstanding innovation, which comes with a hefty $50,000 check. In 1981, Goel leaves IBM to work on a computer chip project at Wang Laboratories in Lowell, Mass. But just a year in, the company unexpectedly changes direction and slashes his funding.
He's 33, married, has a five-year-old son and a six-year-old niece, whom he and his wife took in after Goel's brother died in 1979. The economy looks bleak. Inflation hovers near 10%, and his mortgage rate is a knee-buckling 18%. In some ways, his fate parallels that of Rajee's dad.
Goel, though, thinks he has a good business idea. He noticed while working with outside vendors at Wang that companies need computer-aided engineering software to help design integrated circuits more efficiently. With just $500 in equity, he launches his own company out of a spare bedroom in his house. He accepts consulting jobs to earn some money while he writes the software and then markets it to his contacts. After 18 months, he scores his first big victories when Raytheon and Texas Instruments purchase product licenses for $150,000 each. He hires some employees, and business takes off from there. Eight years later, California-based Cadence Design Systems offers to purchase Goel's company for stock valued at $72 million. He accepts.
"I suddenly had a lot of wealth," he says. "So the question that comes to mind is, 'What is your purpose in life?' You know, these are moments when you start thinking about why you're here and what you're doing with what you have."
Goel decides he wants to do more than just make money. He just doesn't know what. A couple of weeks later, he and his wife, Poonam, are to meet with friends in Boston. By this point, everyone is aware of the buyout. It was in the papers and word spreads fast in their tight-knit Indian-American circle. He knows he'll be asked the inevitable, "What now?" As he ponders the question that morning, he finds his wife and leads her to the makeshift Hindu temple in the corner of their bedroom where they pray daily. With the backdrop of two framed 8½" x 11" prints set atop a table—one of the Hindu god Lord Shiva, one of the deity Krishna—Goel says to his wife, "I want to use our wealth to make a significant difference in the lives of 10,000 people. I don't know exactly how, but I feel like we should try. And 10,000 just seems like a good number to shoot for. How do you feel about that?"
"It sounds like a wonderful idea," she proudly replies.
Those students from his high school days—the ones who would have been college bound except for the expense—eventually come to mind. He now knows it's those kind of people he wants to help.
To pull off his plan, Goel needs trusted individuals living in India to volunteer as "facilitators" to identify deserving students and serve as conduits through which scholarship funds will flow. For this, he gets his stateside friends to nominate close friends and relatives in India, people they know are "of the highest integrity." The Goels officially launch their program, Foundation for Excellence, with a $10 million investment in 1994.
"You cannot waste your grades like that," Rajee's dad says, after she tells him about her plans to skip college so she can teach dance and help with the family's expenses. "Let us worry about your fees."
What Rajee doesn't know is that when her mom isn't teaching, cooking, or pawning her jewelry, she's also seeking advice from teachers at work. One of them mentions to her a scholarship program called the Foundation for Excellence. It funds students in India who want to study engineering or medicine in college. Students must rank among the top 15% in their class, be accepted into approved institutions, and show financial need.
Rajee's mom meets with the foundation representative and applies. Unfortunately, it's late in the year's process so it's possible that no scholarship money is available. Nevertheless, Rajee boards the train to Rourkela at her parents' insistence. Her mom somehow managed to save enough to money to cover her college application fee, so she can start the semester. But the hefty tuition and boarding fees will start rolling in soon thereafter, and she worries she'll be asked to leave before the semester ends.
A few weeks into her freshman year at REC, she gets a letter. It's from the Foundation for Excellence. She opens it in her dorm room, stares at the contents, and cries. It's a check covering her collegiate expenses.
"It was a huge relief because I could focus on education, not wondering how to meet the payments or whether I was going to [have to] drop out," remembers Rajee, who graduated from REC in 2000. She's one of 2,818 college graduates who have benefited from the foundation since the Goels founded it in 1994. Overall, the organization has dished out about $5 million in total aid to 10,513 students throughout India.
Infosys, a billion-dollar information technology and consulting corporation, hired Rajee as a software engineer after she earned her degree. She has been with the company ever since—first in the Chennai office and now as a project manager in its Silicon Valley office in California, where she lives with her husband. Her income enabled her to buy back her mom's jewelry that was still in the pawn shop. She's also put her two younger sisters through college, paid off her parents' loans, and even bought them a 1,000-square-foot apartment in one of Chennai's up-and-coming neighborhoods. And she's donated to the Foundation for Excellence each year, without ever being solicited.
"This organization is kind of like my godfather and godmother," she says. "They helped me complete my education...and they never made a claim that you have to return the money. They were giving it purely to help students, with no questions asked. I know the pain I felt, and if I could prevent a kid from feeling that, I would like to."
For more information on the Foundation for Excellence, visit: www.ffe.org
Mike Ransdell is an award-winning freelance writer. He is a frequent contributor to this magazine.
