Stakes [Pull Up / Put Down]: An Interview with Sachin Nijhawan
I conducted this interview as part of Stakes [Pull Up / Put Down]. For more information about the project, read the project overview. To read additional entries as they come available, subscribe to The Letter.
Sachin and I met through a mutual business contact, who connected us as possible referral partners for our companies.
Though my LinkedIn profile, Sachin encountered this site. After reading a few of the Stakes project entries, he volunteered to participate. We spoke on a Wednesday morning for Sachin, in Houston, and a Wednesday evening for me, in Lausanne. We spoke via Skype, though without video, as Sachin had connected via phone.
An American Indian Immigrant
Sachin identifies as an immigrant in the United States and calls himself an “American Indian.”
He has positive feelings about his immigration experience. “The U.S. is a land of immigrants,” he said. “The heritage of this country is immigration. Everyone came from somewhere else relatively recently.”
Of course, immigrating has its challenges.
“Moving the States was not easy,” Sachin said. “The first two years were very hard. I was used to being in constant touch with my parents, but when you're in the States and you make $500 a month and calling India is $1.63 a minute, it is hard to stay connected. And there was no Skype, there was no videoconferencing. Not seeing people for two years, that was very hard. When I went back, I saw my grandmother, and she had changed so drastically in those three years.”
Ultimately, Sachin said he adapted, and he feels that ability to adapt made all the difference to his success in immigrating. “How do you fit in? How do you listen and understand the culture?” he said. “We have adopted the culture here, our daughter was born here, and this is now home.”
Giving up their Indian citizenship to become U.S. citizens felt heavy to Sachin and to his wife, who he said had an even more difficult time with it than he did. “It wasn’t an easy decision,” he said. “You give away something you belong to.”
Sachin has now lived in the United States longer than he had lived in India. He has received two degrees in the United States: a master’s degree in engineering, which brought him to the country, and a master’s degree in business administration, which he pursued after seeking a career change from engineering to business. Sachin has spent his entire working career in the United States.
After his MBA, Sachin worked for General Electric for many years, an experience that took him to several places in the United States and gave him a breadth and depth of corporate experience. The company sent him overseas away from the United States as well, mainly for one-year stints to places like London and Paris. The short-term nature of these moves meant that he didn’t uproot his family to join him. However, GE eventually posted him to Delhi, India, for a three-year stint in its offices there. For the Delhi assignment, Sachin brought his family with him.
Sachin’s parents and his wife’s parents live in Delhi, yet this didn’t feel like a homecoming to him. Instead, it felt like an expat assignment. He knew he would return to the United States. While in Delhi with GE, the family lived in a community of expats and his daughter attended the American school.
“We felt that it was temporary,” he said. “We were there for three years. We were always going to go back home to the United States.”
No Right Answer
Sachin wonders sometimes if he made the right decision in moving to the United States. “Now that my parents are getting older, the U.S. is very, very far,” he said. “Being this far away from them is hard.”
However, at this point in his life, Sachin feels as though the matter as to his country of residence has closed; if he was ever going to move back to India, he believes he should have returned right after he received his master’s degree in engineering.
Sachin said that, when he returned to India for his three-year expat stint in Delhi, he’d had the assumption that he would understand more about how to get along there than he quickly realized that he did know. After all, he said, he was born and raised in India. How could he not know? Yet he didn’t know.
“I'd never worked in India. Living there every day with GE—which was different than visiting for a couple of weeks—figuring out how school works, and so on, was a phenomenal cultural experience,” he said.
Also, Sachin’s daughter was born and raised entirely in the United States. When discussing whether he would ever move back, Sachin said, “Is it fair to move my daughter to India? For her, the United States is home. Other than the three years expat, it would be an alien place to her. That’s not fair to your kids. That's not home to them. We made the choice to have kids here.”
When Sachin tells his friends and family in India that he wishes he had the same proximity to family that they have, they tell him that he has a better life in Houston.
“My cousins think that I’ve got it made, but yes and no,” Sachin said. “They look at the material things, but the emotional things are what makes the transitions hard. It's not materialistic things. And who cares about the materialistic things at the end of the day? We need one room to sleep in, ultimately. It's the rat race we’re in, but you sit back and think, is it really worth all that effort? That's the challenging piece of these transitions. It’s felt more than thought. It’s hard to put in words. They don’t value that they live so close to their parents. I cherish all the time I get with my parents now.”
Staying in Contact with His Culture
Sachin and his wife work to stay in touch with their culture, and he said that he has become more proud of his Indian heritage and culture since he emigrated to the United States.
“Our roots are in India. We try to instill those values in our daughter. We learned good things as kids that helped us become who we are, and we want to pass these values to her,” Sachin said. “We want our daughter to understand her roots and to understand what being an Indian means. She didn’t grow up there, but I want to ensure that she enjoys Christmas, and she also enjoys Diwali. We do both. I want her to enjoy both of them. Christmas just happens, the whole city is in the Christmas spirit. For Diwali, you have to make an extra effort.”
In addition, the family speaks Hindi at home and has ensured that their daughter is fluent in Hindi. “We make an extra effort for her to speak Hindi. It's powerful, to know multiple languages.”
He said that he found, during his three-year expat stay in Delhi, that even some of the younger people in his family don’t have fluency in Hindi.
“I noticed, when we went back, that the kids there want to mimic the west, rather than being proud of what they are,” Sashin said. “I see people at work changing their names, and I would never do that. I have always been Sachin. It may be hard to pronounce, but I make an effort to pronounce people's names. Make an effort to pronounce mine. I want my daughter to be proud of her heritage and being Indian.”
Sachin said the expat stay in Delhi helped his daughter build more closeness with the family there. They try to return to India as a family at least every other year. Further, they spend time with family living in Washington, D.C., as well.
He acknowledged that generations will change things. He said he is sure that his daughter’s children will have a harder time speaking Hindi than she does, for example. “But the things she learns as a kid will stay with her for life,” Sachin said. “The things you learn as a child about how you do things in life, how you behave in life—they stick with you.”
Looking Forward and Going with the Flow
Sachin said that he doesn’t think much about these topics; he takes each day as an opportunity to move forward, build, and grow. He said he appreciated the opportunity for some introspection.
“When I do have a moment to think, maybe on vacation, I marvel at how much has happened in twenty-five years. So much of it I couldn’t have planned,” he said.
Sachin said he tells people that he mentors to be flexible. “You have to go with the flow sometimes. “It's the journey you're on. This is the journey we took on.”
Thanks, Sachin!
For more information about Stakes [Pull Up / Put Down], the project that generated this interview, read the project statement. If you would like to participate as an interview subject or have a participant to recommend, please contact me. To get updates on the project, subscribe to The Letter.