The Road Less Traveled

One of my favorite things to do in any big city is to get lost in it.  It all started in September of 2001.  My sister and I spent an entire day roaming around London via bus.  We had no plan, no agenda, and no destination.  We hopped on and off busses whenever we saw fit, not caring about the routes they were traveling.  Our only mission was to explore.  This turned out to be one of the most memorable days of my life.  We saw and experienced more of the real London than we ever would have if we followed some tour guide or map.  Since that day, I make it a point to get lost as often as possible.  

New York city is a great city to get lost in.  There are so many nooks and crannies, and you never know what you may discover around any given corner.  Last weekend I went to the city to visit my good friend Hirumi who recently moved there for a job.  (Yay, Hirumi!!!)  On Monday morning, Hirumi had to go to work, but I still had some shopping to do.  I took the 6 train with Hirumi in the morning, and got off at Astor Place hoping to spend some cold hard cash in the stores I had walked by the night before.  The only problem was that it was just after 9 a.m. and most stores did not open until 10.   This gave me the perfect opportunity to lose myself.  I walked around the streets, not looking for anything in particular.  I took rights and lefts whenever I saw fit, and roamed to my heart’s content.  And then, I saw it.  Right there in the corner of 12th and Broadway was the most amazing bookstore I had ever seen, The Strand.  They boasted 18 miles of used and new books, and I bet if you laid all the books out, cover to cover, it just might be true.  It was a book nerd’s paradise.  I love a lot of things in life, but nothing really makes me happier than a good bookstore, and if I hadn’t gotten lost, I never would have found it.  

I like to think of getting lost in a city as a metaphor for life.  Too often we are so consumed with our plan.  Everything has to be laid out, and thought about, and scheduled.  This is the practical approach to living, however sometimes life can be richer if you let go of the reigns a little bit.  Not everything has to work in a certain order, and everything does not have to go according to plan.  Sometimes its when you lose yourself a little bit that you make the best discoveries.

I realized yesterday that I have been back at school for almost two months now, and I still have not written anything about my experience in India over the summer.  Life at Yale, has been hectic, to say the least, but I wanted to at least write a little bit about what I went through in India while it is all still relatively fresh.    Although, this post will not do the experience anything even remotely close to justice. 

As a part of our degree program at Yale, we are required to do a minimum ten week internship.  I completed the required ten weeks in California, so my second internship in India was sort of “just for kicks.”  I wanted a taste of public health outside of a United States setting, and I figured that India was the best place to do so.  This idea was strengthened by the fact that while I had been to India many times before, it had always been for vacation.  All I ever did there was eat, and sleep, and travel, and consume.  I never did anything to contribute.  I wanted to take an opportunity to give back to my parents’ home country, even if it was only for a very short period of time.  

I have always know that things in India don’t run as smoothly as they do in the U.S.  This experience was no different.   When I left for India, I still wasn’t 100% sure that I even had an internship.  The person that I had been communicating with decided to suddenly drop off the face of the earth and stopped responding to my e-mails, so I boarded the plane hoping that things would work out.  If not, at least the required part of my internship was done, and I could use this trip as another vacation.  

When I landed, I was greeted at the airport by my two masis (mom’s sisters).  Even though we live thousands and thousands of miles apart, I am very close to my masis and get along with them extremely well.  After a long 15 hour flight, I was especially happy to see them.  What I love the most about my masis is the fact that like my mom, they are such free spirits who love nothing more but to spend time with family and to laugh.  I never laugh as hard with anyone as I do with them.

This trip also allowed me to spend time with my cousins and their kids.  I have the greatest bunch of nieces and nephews, and I absolutely love spending time with them.

From left to right:  Devaki (she’s shy), Abhay, Nanki, Angad, and Ashwin.  Not pictured, Adi (the newest addition)

After resting for a few days, it was time to determine if there was any internship to be had.  I contacted the people at the Public Health Foundation of India, and they told me that yes, I did indeed have an internship, only it wasn’t the internship I had originally signed up for.  Up until that point my primary research interest had been cancer prevention, and I was supposed to work on a grant funded by the National Cancer Institute.  However, the project was taking longer than expected, and the part that I was supposed to work on was not ready.  Therefore, I was to be placed on an entirely different project with an entirely different team.  

The next day I went to work and met my new boss, Dr. Shah Ebrahim.  Dr. Shah is this baller epidemiologist from Britain and upon my first conversation I was instantly blown away.  I couldn’t believe I was actually getting the opportunity to work with someone who is so well known and has done so much in the field of chronic disease epidemiology.  I met the rest of my team, and learned that I was going to be working on a diabetes study.  There were several different components to the study, but my job was to determine the best anthropometric measure for determining diabetes in Asian Indians, and figure out the most appropriate cut points for that measure.  I won’t go into boring detail over what I actually did, but somewhere along the line a shift took place.  I really had never even considered diabetes as a topic of interest before, but my work in India seriously impacted my outlook.  

As a result of my work with Dr. Shah and my teammates at PHFI, I have become much more aware of the role that chronic disease is starting to play in developing nations.  My eyes were opened to emerging issues that I had never even thought of before.  I realized that I wanted to shift my focus to global health (although in India, they don’t call it global health.  They just call it public health) and try and solve some of the problems contributing to the increasing chronic disease burden in the country to which I can attribute my roots.  

If you want to know more about what exactly it is I did, you can feel free to ask me.  

For now I will leave you with a poster I created for our upcoming internship showcase.  Enjoy!