June 9, 2013.
Twenty years later.
On June 9, 1993, I delivered a speech that changed my life. In it, the activist and precocious physician-to-be spouted philosophy about Redefining Tradition – the title of the Oration – and gave us an earful on my views on tradition and its purposes and propagations.
Twenty years later.
On June 9, 1993, I delivered a speech that changed my life. In it, the activist and precocious physician-to-be spouted philosophy about Redefining Tradition – the title of the Oration – and gave us an earful on my views on tradition and its purposes and propagations.
The faces of the men
sitting behind me are a symbol of what I would go through for the twenty years
that followed….!
That speech was one of my greatest achievements at Harvard, because I had the courage to do something I was warned not to do: Dean Cassandra Simmons (a black female) warned me not to apply for the competition because ‘they only pick white boys.’ I was the first Indian, and woman, to have that podium, to write my name in the Harvard Big-Leather-Book-of-People-That-Give-Commencement-Speeches-at-Harvard.
That fall, I applied for
a Fulbright and was rejected because Harvard forgot to mail my transcript to
them and because I was less meticulous and less meticulously-intuitive than I
am now. Here I am twenty years later, on the precipice of another thing I was
warned not to do: go beyond conventional
medicine, since I was trained in conventional medicine. All the laws are
against my work both here and in India, since Indian conventional doctors
cannot teach or practice Ayurveda … but laws are meant to be … evolved.