EPISODE 2: AMIT KRISHNAN

November 23, 2020

“So, how big is your village?,” Odungo asked me. I had just shown him a photo of Manhattan on my phone, explaining that I go to school on this tiny blip on the top left of my screen. We were in Morunera, a tiny farming village in rural Uganda. Odungo was 53 years old, the village elder, and one of the only members of the community who knew English. I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to his question, other than to say, “pretty big, I guess.”

Let me take a step back and introduce myself. My name is Amit Krishnan. I was born in New York. When I was just a few weeks old, my family moved back to Chennai, India. It was supposed to be a one-way ticket; my parents wanted to be closer to their family. But that wasn’t in the cards, and we moved back to New York when I was 4 years old. Tamil was my first language, and my life in Chennai was all I knew at the time. We didn’t have anywhere to stay at the time, so we moved in with a friend of a relative. They had themselves emigrated to the States a few years prior, and had some words of advice for my parents. “Make sure your son is Americanized. Speak to him in English, not Tamil. Dress him in American clothes, pack him American food.”

I grew up in Rockland County, across the Tappan Zee Bridge, about 30 minutes from NYMC. I lived in a relatively homogenous, suburban, mostly white community. As a result, I completely lost touch with my culture. By the time I was in high school, I couldn’t form sentences in my mother tongue. While my dad was watching the Cricket World Cup, I was waiting for the NBA playoffs to start. My parents watched Bollywood movies and listened to Hindi music. I was sneaking into 21 Jump Street at the local AMC and pumping Yeezy on Spotify.

When I got to college, I became close with some of my international friends from Bombay and New Delhi. I joined the Hindu Students Organization in an effort to embrace my roots. I bought some kurtas for Raas Garba, learned how to make some fire paneer makhani, and went all out every year for Holi (the one where you throw colors at each other). I’ve started watching Bollywood movies, and maybe I’ll pick up a thing or two from my roommate Rohan’s angelic shower renditions of popular Bollywood bangers.

Diversity was abundant at Columbia, and the school was situated on the edge of Morningside Heights, next to Harlem. I was constantly in contact with new beliefs, cultures, viewpoints, and was positively enamored. My friends hailed from California, Texas, Toronto, London, Dubai, Mumbai. Some grew up in negative familial environments, others were raised in nurturing and affluent environments. They were activists, programmers, actors, and engineers. I realized all I had been missing by conforming myself to the ideals of a single community and decided that exploring cultures and hearing my friends’ stories was my new favorite thing. To me, the world’s vastness is not a measure of geography, but one of diversity and experience.

So when Odungo asked me how big Manhattan was, I was at a loss for words. In my ongoing effort to explore outside my comfort zone and see what I could learn from those I perceived as “different” from me, I signed up to spend a few weeks in a small village outside of Soroti, Uganda with Engineers Without Borders. Our aim was to provide electricity to the villagers’ homes using solar microgrids. While surveying the community, I asked Odungo about his family. He looked very sorrowful, so I immediately apologized. He responded “it’s okay, it’s just my son Julius.” Julius had seemed perfectly healthy, but a few months earlier he developed a fever and jaundice and died suddenly. Julius had yellow fever.

He was not alone. In recent years the village had been hit by a drought and a blight caused by locusts which destroyed their crops. Parents could not work, children could not attend school; the village’s situation was heartbreaking. To some of the villagers, I appeared to be somebody with a special kind of knowledge; a person who had the answers to all their questions. But that couldn’t have been further from the truth; I was just a wanna-be engineer trying to electrify homes, when the villagers needed better nutrition and healthcare.

It’d be disingenuous to say that my time in Uganda made me instantaneously realize “I want to save people.” My parents are pediatricians, my sister is currently a DO candidate in her 3rd year at Touro, and I’d been a volunteer at my town’s ambulance corps for years. Throughout my life I was surrounded by medicine, so it was always in the back of my head. But I did come back from Uganda with renewed purpose and perspective. I saw firsthand that proper healthcare is the backbone of every individual, and that individuals are the backbone of communities.

When I got back, I thought about my experience in Uganda. Odungo and his community lived a lifestyle completely foreign to mine and yet we were so similar. They raised their children, worked together as a community, and shared laughs, tears, and love. These are universal languages after all. And that’s when I realized one of my goals in life: To absorb as much as I can from those who lived different lives than my own. After that trip, I started traveling more (until Covid hit), and I moved to Wisconsin for a year to get a taste of living outside New York (Go Badgers!). It’s also the main reason I signed on to be the Co-Chair of Humans of NYMC with my boy Hugh, who just published an awesome story by the way. Everyone in this class is so talented, diverse, and unique, and I have so much to learn from all of you.

What are your 5 Most Recently Played Artists on Spotify?
Jon Bellion, Quinn XCII, Alison Wonderland, A Boogie Wit da Hoodie, and of course, my guy Yeezus

If you could live in any alternate universe, which would it be?
The world of Avatar: The Last Airbender, for sure. I once had a dream I could waterbend and I still think about it from time to time.

Any Netflix Recommendations?
I just started watching this one show, Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories and man is it amazing. Picture if there was a TV show parallel to Lo-Fi beats on Spotify, so relaxing.

Pick something or someone from NYMC to give a shout-out to!
That's tough, can I just choose the whole school? Of course, the best apartment on campus and the second best, too. Shout out to the best anatomy lab group as well. Lastly, huge shoutouts to Peter Xiong and Raj Pammal, two of the smartest, yet most down to earth and friendly folks I know.

If someone wants to talk to you, they should lead with:
A joke, a story, or a question. Maybe Netflix and Spotify suggestions. Definitely a Spongebob meme. Really anything, I love talking to people!