Moving towards equality

Imagine moving to a new place you have never visited before, where people don’t seem to (or prefer not to) speak much English, let alone your native tongue. Where people look different from you or have different cultural beliefs and practices. How do you develop a rapport with your colleagues or make friends? This was my life when I moved from Chennai, Tamil Nadu, in southern India, to Baroda in the western Indian state of Gujarat, where I decided to pursue a research fellowship after my master’s in chemistry. In the lab, my colleagues did not seem to want to share established protocols with me, whereas outside the lab, everybody saw me, a person who spoke neither Gujarati nor Hindi, as an outsider. Little did I know that this experience would prepare me with the resilience I needed for a life abroad.

Reassured by the presence of a diverse international community in the US, and the success and happiness of my limited network of friends over there, I decided to experience what I believed to be a meritocracy first-hand. It gave me strength and inspiration when I learned that the Nobel prize winner Venki Ramakrishnan, who also hailed from Tamil Nadu, had studied in Baroda before moving to the US for his graduate studies.