From Dallas to Austin Through Kerala
“A foreign bird with a local walk” is an Indian phrase for a person who is out of place and has learned to adapt. Some use that phrase to describe me. My skin is dark, and my name is a Syriac–Malayalam name that is common in South India. But I grew up in Dallas. Whether I am walking in India or in Texas, I am a foreign bird. My life is a journey of discovering my local walk when everything else is out of place.
When I was two, my parents briefly took me back to Kerala. Salted air sweeps the streets of Kerala after passing tall thin groves of coconut trees that stand as guardians against the Arabian Sea. It continues to blow until the wind curls upward on the green slopes of the rounded mountains bounding the eastern edge of Kerala.
In May of 1498, Vasco da Gama found the rare spices of India in my home state of Kerala. He found what Columbus missed. Many years later ships landed and connected Kerala to the West again. This time it was with India’s second undersea high-speed cable.
Kerala is more than my ancestry. It’s a hidden gem that leads India in literacy, education, and lifespan. Some have debated how to recreate Kerala’s successes across the rest of India. But journalist Manu Joseph said it can’t be replicated. Kerala’s unique social cohesion and community participation are the rare spices that set it apart.
When I returned to Dallas, I stood out as a foreign bird learning the local walk. Like many immigrant children, my parents pressured me to excel in school while not forgetting my heritage. Within a few years, these pressures collided.
I became a presidential scholar. Then I got my medical degree from The University of Texas. Mom and dad were excited. But something was out of place and the pressure started building.
Residency began. A patient walks in. We rush through our time, and I scribble notes. Then the next patient walks in… scramble, scribble, and repeat. Day after day was scramble, scribble and repeat. Morning to night was scramble, scribble, and repeat. It’s a great formula for making money. But it felt meaningless, and I felt out of place.
I didn’t want to commit decades of my life to such a broken system. That’s when I saw an opportunity to make a difference for patients, doctors, and my community in Kerala. Electronic Health Records were virtually non-existent in my field. And the IT talent in Kerala could bring order to this disorder.
It was years before I told my parents about dropping out of medical residency. Their lips were thin, and tight and stretched across their faces. Beams of disapproval shot out their eyes. I’m sure I looked like a local bird with a foreign walk to them.
I continued to reach back to my parent’s home by connecting talented software developers in Kerala to the American healthcare technology needs. We discovered we could build specialized software teams in days as opposed to months. Better outcomes for patients also created better outcomes for my community in Kerala.
Next, fast growth led to fast disorder. Client needs moved so fast that structure was an afterthought. Clients were upset. Our team was upset. Somehow, I had slipped back into the same problem of medicine – high volume with poor outcomes. The answer came one day from the barber’s chair.
As scissors were whirling around my head, a fellow named Curt Hammer started talking about his days at Charles Schwab. He had been Schwab’s senior manager in Market Data Solutions and ran the system that processed 15 million messages each second. Curt helped us find our local walk. He brought enterprise structure and order to our software development.
Today, seven of the world’s ten largest tech giants are American. There’s a unique American spice that makes that happen. And we don’t see that changing. But there is one threat we can’t ignore.
The U.S. birth rate is a problem. We can’t change that. But we can connect the rare talents of Kerala with the rare genius of America’s entrepreneurs.
Yes, we’ll always be the foreign bird. But our local walk is changing the world through U.S. leadership. We’re counting on the American entrepreneurial genius to continue bringing order when things are out of place. As those winds of change will blow, the coconut trees on the coast of Kerala will bend in the direction of America.
