The American Dream: A Cliche? Part 4

The American Dream: A cliché? Part 4

Irshya’s curse

There is Hera, the goddess of Envy,  in Greek Mythology. There is Irshya, a sin in Buddhism.  I succumbed to both of them .   We all do, from time to time. So did Neil, our friend Nilubabu.  But Nilu actually put a curse on him out of jealousy. I would not go that far.

 Nilu’s   curse worked, kind of! It took about forty years, though!

Who is this person that everybody was jealous of?  It was Ashok  -who finally  overachieved the American Dream, but many years later!  Nilu  put a curse on him a lot earlier, when he was merely a student!

Let me reveal some details!  When I started teaching Economics at the KU economics Department, Ashok was a graduate student in Pharmacy. In the early eighties in the middle of America, there was only a handful of Bengalis, so I had to hang out with every single one of them! In my arrogant and obnoxious avatar back then, I didn’t like him much.  Neil, a math professor,  absolutely hated him! He never gave me a list of reasons why he would prefer an ugly gnome  to Ashok , but  I presume that such a  list would look like this:

Pharmacy was not even  a proper science subject (!)

Ashok had a pot belly! I mean a big one!

His   personal hygiene was questionable, at best.

He was stingy  as hell.

His apartment was dirty and smelly.

He was , ahem,  uncouth.

He had fat sideburns that went out of style in the seventies.

He was not  well-read and “cultured” as we were (we were both  Presidency college Bongs (Bengalis)),  conversations with him were strained and boring.

He talked and gossiped behind your back – a lot.

I agree with him being stingy! He invited me once and fed me a curry with chicken gizzards only! I mean, he didn’t even buy a pack of  regular chicken meat!  Gizzards are bought as fish baits by Americans!

However I will reserve my  judgment on the  other items on this list.

No one was jealous of Ashok at this time. He was just a poor Ph.D. student!

Once his thesis proposal was approved ,  he knew he was going to finish soon, and he went to India to visit his family. Rumors started floating that his mom would get him hitched to a girl. Rumor mongers were right.

Ashok came back with Shinjini. We all got to meet Shinjini. And our eyes popped. I mean, this was a hard pop indeed . Shinjini was very, very beautiful. Not  supermodel  beautiful like slender and tall but voluptuous, with a heart-shaped face like a Hindu goddess and a gorgeous smile.  And a fantastic , warm personality, gracious and charming.

OK,  OK, I will stop blabbering now.

This was a misfit that could only happen in an Indian negotiated marriage. The wives of ours were all jealous of Shinjini , but at the same time,  in a crooked way , happy that she got hitched to an apparent loser.  We, the husbands, sighed, and  maybe dreamed of her  at night .

Neil, the math professor,  romanced his Punjabi wife while he was doing  his Ph. D. and married her later, refusing to agree to an arranged marriage.  I think he saw the opportunity cost of love marriage personified here.

 He gave us lectures about how poor Shinjini’s life is destroyed  for getting married to this bozo.

“You will see” he would say, shaking his head,  “ She is too good for him. It is not meant to be. How can  she even sleep with him? Either she will ruin him or evil spirits will get him eventually!”

Notwithstanding the aforementioned curse, Ashok finished his Ph. D. on time and left town for his first post-doc job.

We met again about twelve years later and caught up. During these years, Ashok worked in a well-known university as a professor, applied for and received a lot of grants, and invested a lot of his money in mutual funds that paid off nicely. He was offered a job as a full professor in a university in Kansas city and  moved there in 1994. Shinjini was also working as a post-doc in his department.

But their house!! Two-income families usually buy big houses in USA, but this was over the top.,  What I liked was not the five bedrooms and four bathrooms, but a huge living room with a thirty feet tall glass window overlooking a small lake. And a huge family room in the basement, with a projection TV, a billiard table and enough  space for about thirty people to congregate and party!

The former bozo had apparently achieved the American dream !   Shinjini was a devoted wife, a mother of two boys. She worked full-time in the pharmacy lab and worked full-time at home cooking and cleaning at his huge house while Ashok relaxed in front of TV. She still looked beautiful and gracious. Ashok had become considerably fatter and had started wearing a disgusting hairpiece by then.

As often happens with Indian academics in USA, Ashok really was not assimilated with the mainstream American society.  He had only two lives – working in his pharmacy Lab, and hanging out with his Bengali pals in Bichitra, the local Bong (Bengali) club. As he became more powerful, he converted both to his fiefs. Ashok  ruled both  fiefs like a feudal lord. This was not supposed to go well, and it didn’t.  He actually comingled his two fiefs ,  which turned out to be disastrous.

Almost every weekend and on every social occasion, Ashok  had a party in his grand house. Either it was a meeting for Bichitra, or for watching a cricket match on his projection TV, or a musical recital.   Shinjini will cook a four or five course meal for at least twenty people. It was hard on her, doing this so frequently. So Ashok started asking the Indian students that work in his lab to help out with cleaning and serving. They were already at the meetings anyway! It kind of snowballed from there. Soon , he was asking the Indian students to attend all the meetings, and take care of  setting up the tables, serving the food and cleaning up afterwards. Some complied voluntarily. Some not so much. The vegetarian students from  South India did not care for Shinjini’s famous chicken recipes and particularly resented serving  their thesis supervisor at his every whim.  

Unfortunately, it did not stop there. Soon, Ashok asked his own Ph.D.  students’ help for mowing his huge lawn and raking the leaves in the fall. His lawn was about three acres, took hours to mow even with a riding motorized mower. His basement flooded about fifteen years ago, he asked the students to come and bail out the water with mops and buckets. No matter how revered the professor is, Indian students would definitely hate to do this. By this time, he was wealthy enough to hire professional people to restore his basement – it was a serious lapse of judgment to ask for the students’ help.

The Pharmacy  lab was more like a hotbed of politics and intrigue than a place for scholastic discourse like in a physics or Economics department.   Grants for pharmaceutical research are given by  government agencies and by Pharma companies. The research output is sometimes patented, sometimes sold by the university to private firms, sometimes used by the faculty to jockey for more grants.  You can smell the corruption perking up all over this place.

Ashok had  accumulated  grants worth multi-million dollars. Nobody in the department came even close! All the  Deans  over the years were  certifiable sleazebags, they were ecstatic about the 40% overhead kept by the university from the research grants, and ate out of Ashok’s hand.

Ashok became the department chair and a legit despot. He would bring droves of Indian Ph.D. students from India and worked them  as hard as possible in his lab,  tempting them with lucrative job offers when they finish. The American students were a notable minority that was  left out of Ashok’s carrot and sticks regime. He was  also totally dictatorial with the other faculty members, who had only paltry research grants.

At Bichitra, he was the roaring,  boasting president.  He did a lot for Bongs,  for sure. Parties with delicious meals frequently at his elegant house.  He organized many concerts and events in Kansas City where he brought really famous artistes from India. I know for a fact that over the last twenty-five years, he invited Biswajit (the Bengali movie star –remember him?), Sandhya Mukherjee , the iconic  singer, and very recently Sreya Ghosal and many others like them. His  record was impressive indeed!

All the artistes were housed with Ashok where Shinjini slaved for hours to fulfill their culinary  and other needs

Shinjini told me about the time a Classical Dance troupe of six young women were guests in her house. She liked their vivacious personalities, was  shocked at their frequent sexually  charged conversations,  and amazed at the voracious  appetites  of these  skinny women! She said they ate more than her teenage boys!

In return for his magnanimity, Askok  demanded absolute obedience .  Many  other Bongs were  established professionals too,  they were loath  to bow before him.

The fiefdoms would have continued long-term, but  there was one  big thorn!

Dr. Beeveeshon  joined Ashok’s faculty in early 2000’s and also  became a member of Bichitra. He was a Bong! Irked by Ashok’s many shenanigans, vengeful that he was, he kept quiet for six years until he got tenure which gives lifetime job security to American faculty.

 Beeveeshon  attacked on all fronts right after tenure. He argued bitterly with Ashok about his policies in the faculty meetings. Ashok threatened revenge.  Beeveshon then  rounded up ex-students of Ashok who hated him. Together , they complained to the Dean and the Chancellor about his illegal exploitation of students and  about the frequent threats he made to the students for non-compliance (“I will cancel your visa and throw you out of the department”  – he allegedly said this to many students unwilling to  do his chores. )

On another front,  Beeveeshon and another Ph.D. student accused Ashok about appropriating the results of a  particularly successful  experiment for treating eye infections. This was a “nano” drug that was applied in minute amounts by electronic methods to cure several eye problems. Although still not fully developed, a Pharma company bought  this from Ashok,  got a patent jointly in their name and in Ashok’s name and paid him more than a million dollars privately.  The complaint was that the university and the graduate student who worked on this drug development got duped and should have been compensated.

The complaints were lodged and received by the Dean and the Chancellor, who promptly ignored them (Ashok was the golden goose, and these people were sleazy as hell!).  Beeveeshon sued Ashok and the University in Civil Court and complained to the police and Human Resources. Pretty much nothing happened  with these.

Beeveeshon then submitted his entire dossier on Ashok to KCStar, the leading regional newspaper. They conducted several clandestine interviews with current and former Ph. D. students, and dissenting members of Bichitra and also Ashok’s neighbors.

Around November 2018, in two different  explosive  exposes in a month, KCStar revealed how an Indian-American professor treated his students as slaves and how he stole his students’ research duping the students and the university .  The sh**t had indeed hit the fan!!

The Chancellor listened now, so did the police and the FBI. The Chancellor suspended him with pay, promising  an internal investigation.  Things started looking ominous for Ashok with lawsuits already pending and more suits (possibly criminal!) hanging on his head.  

It is very difficult to dismiss tenured faculty from a university. Academic dishonesty or moral turpitude has to be proved rigorously to satisfy an independent university  committee , and its decision could be appealed to the university Regents,  then to the State High court and possibly beyond. If Ashok  was belligerent and litigious, he could have continued vigorously fighting this for about ten years. I don’t think  any charges could have been sustained besides the patent issue, which he could have settled out of court. So he could have worked and got paid for at least ten more  years , although his work environment would have been extremely hostile and lawyers would have taken a lot of his money.  But then again if the final  ruling turned out to be in his favor, he could have then countersued for wrongful and malicious action on the part of the university and asked  for some major compensation.

Nevertheless, Ashok was sixty-eight years old at that time, and did the right thing.  He resigned immediately  with full retirement benefits  and kept all his money. No charges were proved against him because all charges were dropped. The patent suit continued and he settled it in 2021 for  what I think was a relatively small chunk of money.

Financially, he ultimately did very well. All of the retirement funds, the royalty from present and future patents, and sales proceeds from past  research belong to him, they are beyond litigation after the settlement dues are paid.

What happened here is a rags- to- riches- to -public -shame episode. He lost a few more years of rule over his fiefdoms as well.

His wonderful wife is constantly cheering him up. Since he has no other social friends, she takes him  to Bengali social gatherings around his town. In 2019, the news was still relatively unknown, so half the people were talking to him normally, the other half was whispering behind his back.  By now, I guess everyone knows. 

I met Ashok in Kansas during Durga Puja celebrations in 2019. An Indian couple wanted to visit him ,  so I drove them to his house for lunch. Ashok is now almost obese, and still wears the same disgusting hairpiece.  But  Shinjini, in her early sixties,  still looks fabulous  with dyed hair and a little make up. The house is still spectacularly decorated.  The boys are in their thirties and live separately. I guess the weekly feasts at his home  have stopped for now.

To be fair to Ashok, it is not uncommon for faculty to ask their Ph. D.  students for favors.  Nor is it unusual for faculty   to claim at least partial credit or more for research that was done wholly by their students.  Ashok just way overstepped his bounds and became a tyrant and a thief.  

Now he spends his days alone  in his beautiful house, surrounded by very expensive knick-knacks from around the world. He and his wife will travel a lot now all over the world.  Shinjini will call me when they  come  to Kolkata next.

As I said before, the curse of Hera worked, kind of.  But Shinjini  really loved the  bozo in good times and bad,  as their marriage vows indicated.  I am really  proud of her.