Annual Graduation Ritual Brings Joy to Seniors who Bridge Generations

By Jawahar Malhotra

CLEAR LAKE: Whoever said that age slows you down didn’t have the sprightly Radha Golikeri in mind. A young 89-year-old, she has been the driving force behind the celebratory party for graduating high school seniors for the past fifteen years and this past Saturday, June 1, she held her 16th annual party at the Mogul Restaurant in Space City. Of the 45 graduates she found out and invited, 35 came to be honored, given a small token award and gift and a lot of affection at an afternoon event and luncheon.

For Amma, as Golikeri is affectionately known by virtually everyone around her, the annual event brings out all the skills she had honed at Hindustan Levers in Bombay, from which she retired as a Manager of the Marketing Research Department. She starts by culling all the yearbooks she can lay her hands on of the Clear Lake School District and other neighboring ones and finding the young Indian kids who are graduating. She also relies on word-of-mouth and then starts calling the kid’s parents. In the 16 years, she has had feted 625 seniors, out of which 15 were Valedictorians.

The annual event was actually an idea of Mogul restaurant’s late owner Sanjeeva Rao Allam and his son Ram has continued the tradition by subsidizing the luncheon and allowing the use of the restaurant, which moved 18 months ago to a new and spacious corner location just a few minutes south of its old location on Bay Area Blvd. The India Culture Center of Clear Lake and the Indian Seniors Association of Clear Lake co-sponsor the event each year, but Amma spearheads the ceremony.

With her infectious warm nature and smiling countenance, Amma easily wins over those who come in contact with her. Though she counseled the young seniors on the future paths they were about to take, they probably took it as grandmotherly words of advice, little knowing that Amma was herself only a high school graduate who had reached high in the corporate world by dint of her own perseverance, hard work and ability to adapt.

Amma was born in Bombay (when it still wasn’t known as Mumbai) but grew up in the little village of Sanikatta in the north Kanara District of Karnataka State. As a young woman, she sought out work in Bombay and was hired by Hindustan Levers to do market research and collect data mainly because she knew several Indian languages – Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Hindi and English – and later learnt Gujarati. She traveled a lot, sometimes with other trainees (“two who became Chairmen of the company,” she chuckled) and retired after 30 years with the firm.

In April 1984, after her husband Vasant passed away, she came to the US to be with her son Sudhir and his wife Ranjana to help with the first of their three children, Reema, Rohit and Rita. Sudhir retired as a Chemical Engineer with BP Amoco (and is now with Bechtel) but graduated from IIT Bombay and then came to the US in 1968 to get his Masters and PhD from the University of Houston. It was hard to keep the active Amma down, as she sought our avenues for pent up energy. Even today, she goes to the United Way Senior Center for a few hours to meet others, do exercises and other activities.

For the graduation program this past Saturday, Amma had invited Sonal Bhatt, the President of the ICC-CL to speak; Pankaj Dhume, President of the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce of Greater Houston (who also had a graduating son, Gaurav, at the party) and Shakuntla Malhotra, my mother, who writes the popular Mama’s Punjabi Recipes in this newspaper.

After introductions by Amma, Adarsh Suresh, an 11-year-old, sang the American and Indian National Anthems. He memorized the Indian one just a day earlier, he confided. Bhatt said she threw out her old speech and rewrote another that morning, relating the hardships she had to face in her own life as she struggled with English when she first came to the US, concentrated on education, raised two daughters as a single-mom and became a teacher. Don’t make excuses, take one day at a time, don’t lose focus on priorities was her advice. “Never say never,” she said, “and work hard for success.”

Dhume then shared his thoughts for the future. An undergraduate of Bombay University who did graduate work in the US, Dhume is a VP of Global Corporate Sales at BMC Software, for whom he worked in Pune, India till he moved back to the US last year. He peppered his keynote speech with witticisms and advised the new graduates to keep five guiding principles in mind: to invest their time wisely, invest in their dreams and passion, invest in your friends, invest in mental and physical health and most of all, invest in having fun in life. “The end goal should be the pursuit of happiness,” he said, “and the money will follow.”

Shakuntla Malhotra is also an octogenarian, soon to be 85-years-old, and is affectionately known as Mama, by many people here. She moved to the US ten years ago from New Delhi after her husband Jagdish passed away. She spent most of her life traveling with him in the Indian Foreign Service. She has lived in the UK, Pakistan, Iran, Switzerland and Romania, as well as visited many other countries, but at heart she is still a devout Hindu and true Punjabi cook. She enjoys the company of people and is very active in the local community, and writes her recipes. Mama passed out the awards to the graduating seniors as Amma called their names out.

As the awards were being given out to each senior, at first they were not sure how to appreciate the two elderly ladies. Then one bowed down to touch their feet and later the others followed this gesture of respect so common in India, though a few hugged them. Rishi Suresh, a valedictorian (the other, Sona Manjunath, was not present) gave the words of thanks on behalf of the students, saying he was glad of his identity in two cultures; that he wasn’t an ABCD (American Born Confused Desi) in the conflicted manner, but an American Born Cultured Desi.