Kausthub Kumar Marries Deepa Raghunathan

Kumar 1in

By Jawahar Malhotra

HOUSTON: Fewer and fewer unions among young Indian couples – now even in the Old Country – seem to follow the arranged marriage footsteps of their parent’s generation; with most  families opting to introduce their adult children and take a wait-and-see attitude. Among young Indian-Americans who are of the marriageable age the reverse, it seems, is more often the case, as they introduce their parents to the ones they have chosen.

So, it is refreshing to see a young couple who have taken their parents suggestion and followed roughly along a traditional path of courtship that led to marriage. “We met through common friends of our parents, who didn’t really know each other,” explained Kausthub Kumar after the reception held at the Texas Safari Ranch on Saturday, January 31. “I called her up and was pleasantly surprised that she was so cheerful and laughed all the time.”

At that time, Deepa Raghunathan was living at home in Dallas, studying for her Medical Board exams and getting ready for a residency program. Kausthub drove up to meet her a few times, but mostly it was her who came down to Houston for the whole year that they dated. “And then, I proposed in March 2014,” remembers Kausthub.

Almost eight months later, in November, the couple was married in a traditional Hindu ceremony in Chennai, India where both families have many elderly relatives who would not have been able to travel to attend. At the Houston reception, before dinner, they showed a short video of the entire wedding ceremonies to a huge outpouring of friends and family.

The groom’s best friend, Sonny Berry, bearded and with shoulder-length hair tried to rib the couple and inject humor into the event. And then another close friend, Sunil Gadgil, a soprano saxophone teacher and performer, and his musician friends dating to UT Austin – Billy McPHail on alto saxophone, Djamel Mami on tenor saxophone and Michael Hertel on baritone saxophone – played favorite songs from the Beatles and a few classical pieces from Johann Sebastian Bach. A typically South Indian dinner buffet and an Italian pasta station were catered by Dawat Catering.

Kausthub, 31, is an international tax attorney working in internal restructuring and mergers and acquisitions at Price Waterhouse Coopers. He has a Bachelors in Business, specializing in accounting, an MBA in Finance and a Law degree, all from the University of Houston and is currently pursuing an Executive LLM in tax law online from New York University, hoping to get it in 2017.His father Seshadari, is a journalist who publishes the Ft. Bend Independent and his mother, Kamala is a revenue agent with the IRS. He has a younger brother, Keshav, 26 who is an assistant manager at Dynamic Fitness.

Deepa, 27, is a resident in internal medicine at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, and hopes to finish in May, then do a fellowship in cardiology in Houston. She received her Bachelors in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Texas in Austin and finished her medical school at Texas A&M in Temple. Her father Srinivasan is a researcher in x-ray chromatography at UT Southwestern in Dallas and her mother is a homemaker. She has a younger brother, Srini who works for Citibank in Dallas.

The couple hopes to go on a honeymoon to Switzerland later this summer and will make their home here in Houston.