I grew up in a small suburb of Mumbai. I was always a bright and curious chap. We grew up poor, but I had access to the school library and was friends with many kids who were rich and not ungenerous, so I could freely borrow lots of books and drink richly of this cup. I was not very athletic but enjoyed my games of cricket and competed well in track. But I found that academics came very easily to me – especially math and science. I was also multilingual and studied five languages in school, including Sanskrit. This academic prowess gave me a sense of self-worth, even though the stark reality of my family’s life was that some months we would find it hard to balance bills and make ends meet.

All through my school years, I was always the topper, the school captain, the inter-school competition winner and all that. Except in eighth grade. In eighth grade, I was beaten to the top rank in class by another student. This resulted in a somber family gathering, where I felt I was in the middle of an inquisition. A collection of uncles and aunts, and my dad, all of whom had probably been vicariously living through my exploits, gathered around to interrogate me and my reasons for this “failure.” It was probably the most disheartening moment of my life, and a moment that I still remember as the day I lost my childhood. In a startling moment of awareness, I realized that all these adults that had convened that evening because I came second in my eighth-grade class needed to grow up. That they were shallow. That they had reduced me to an abstraction. That my school rank meant something more to them than whether I truly learned something from my schooling or whether I had fun doing it.

It was probably the most disheartening moment of my life, and a moment that I still remember as the day I lost my childhood.

This began to change my feelings of self-worth. It was around this time that I began considering doing something with my life that was more humanistic, that was more “real,” and that touched the lives around me. In my young mind, one of the ways to do that was to become a doctor. I began dreaming of becoming a doctor and serving a village or some under-served community. I began researching what I needed to do get admission into medical colleges. I engaged seniors and teachers on how I should go about achieving my goal. The consensus was to get good marks in science and math in 12^th grade and then apply to admission to the government medical schools, since they were hugely subsidized. (Private schools were beyond my family’s reach). This meant going head to head with the top talent in the country, since competition was fierce. But despite the overwhelming odds, and the fact that I had limited resources, I was up for the challenge. Just a year back, on a whim, I had gone to the USIA (United States Information Agency) to research educational opportunities in the US. I then used up all my saved pocket money earned by tutoring young kids to appear for the SATs and applying to various schools for undergraduate programs. I achieved very high scores and gained admission to some leading schools including Northwestern, Brown (and, yes, Tufts). But my dad could not afford even the plane tickets and dismissed it all as my foolish fancy. However, the experience had given me a degree of confidence in my abilities and I gave the medical school admissions a good try. I ended up missing making the cut by 2 marks, and it devastated me. My dad rubbed it all in, and almost in a daze, I quietly licked my wounds and enrolled in a regular undergraduate program in Science.

I hung out with a bunch of ne’er-do-wells, smoking pot, drinking, listening to heavy metal music and reading Kafka and Castaneda.

I sleepwalked through three years of grad school and graduated with a BS in Physics. I was 20 years old, I had a basic degree and now I had no idea what to do with my life. I tried sales and quickly got sick of walking around with samples making cold calls. I began wasting time at home, much to my parents’ chagrin. I hung out with a bunch of ne’er-do-wells, smoking pot, drinking, listening to heavy metal music and reading Kafka and Castaneda. One day, my elder brother visited my parents’ house and took me out for a long walk. He told me that I was a very capable guy in the prime of my youth, and that I should not be wasting my time. When I countered him, he quickly cut me off and suggested that I enroll in a course for Advertising and Marketing, while I made up my mind on what to do with my life. He offered to pay the fees as well. So, I began my evening classes at this school and in a few months, I landed myself a job as a trainee copywriter at a small ad agency in Mumbai. I learned a lot and moved on to a bigger agency and found myself at a Senior Copywriter position in a short while. In a few years, I grew tired of the tawdry and ersatz world of Mumbai advertising, but I loved writing. So, I segued into journalism. I began my journalism career reporting on the advertising industry for a business magazine. Eventually, I moved on to run the web site of one of the leading afternoon dailies in the city.

Yet, I felt something missing. By this time, I was married to my college sweetheart, with my wife having embarked on a career in Biotechnology. She had been talking to me about pursuing her PhD in Biotech for some time. I had been thinking about transitioning into Broadcast Journalism and documentary film making for a while as well. After much thought and discussion, we both decided to pursue our options for graduate school in the US. We got our passports, got some study guides to prepare for the GRE and began getting our affairs in order. In about a year, our plans had borne fruit. We both had been admitted to a few schools, but I decided on the graduate program for Broadcast Journalism at NYU, while she settled on the PhD program in Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, since that was the combination with the shortest geographical distance between them.

We started school and our separate lives in a new country. Things were terrible for the first few months as we adjusted to loneliness and lack of money. I ate French fries one day and onion rings the next, since I couldn’t afford anything else. My wife’s situation was slightly better, since she had an assistantship and a teaching job. I worked for cash at the local photocopy store. But I enjoyed school immensely, met some great teachers and made some great friends. As I finished up and began my first practical training assignment, 9/11 happened. This changed the job landscape for me entirely. I had hoped to land some type of gig within the production departments of one of the news station chains, but quickly found that none of them would sponsor an H1 alien work visa on my behalf to hire me. My hopes were dashed again.

I packed up and moved to Philadelphia into my wife’s tiny dorm room and stayed home – looking for job openings, giving interviews every few days, only to be turned down when I mentioned the visa sponsorship. I remained unemployed for nearly a year.

I packed up and moved to Philadelphia into my wife’s tiny dorm room and stayed home – looking for job openings, giving interviews every few days, only to be turned down when I mentioned the visa sponsorship. I remained unemployed for nearly a year, until I began volunteering for free at the local PBS station. After a few months, they agreed to hire me part time, provided I paid for my own lawyer for the visa paperwork. During this time at the TV station, I began teaching myself how to encode videos, how to set up web sites and various other aspects of Information Technology. Since this job was part-time, I also freelanced as a videographer/cameraperson for various documentary film makers and movie makers, wrote for a bunch of web sites and networked a lot. One of my acquaintances urged me to move to Virginia for a full-time job in IT, at a junior position. After discussing it with my wife, I decided to give it a try. I moved to northern Virginia and began working for a defense contractor. My domain appeared to be videoconferencing and collaboration, of which I had no previous knowledge or experience. I had to travel a lot for the job, and I learned everything I needed to on the job. I used all the time I had on the road to learn more about how everything interconnected and began increasing the breadth and depth of my knowledge.

In a year or so, my wife finished her PhD and moved to Virginia to be with me. She began a post-doc assignment at the University of Maryland, while I began polishing up my resume – with the specter of the work visa and the tough path to permanent residency hanging over my head like Damocles’ sword all the while. I finally caught a break as a contractor to the United States General Services Administration, with a work visa for three years. My employer also agreed to file for a green card if things worked out. I thought things were finally working out.

But around the same time began my tryst with pain. It started as a dull ache around my hips. At first, I thought it was a sprain or something muscular – maybe I had pulled or tweaked something. But it persisted and just wouldn’t go away. When it began bothering me constantly, I sought medical help. They thought it was a runner’s ailment and advised me to cut out road-running and do some stretching. Stretching seemed to make it worse. Now the pain was beginning to shoot up and down my legs – but was decidedly much worse on the left side. X-rays didn’t reveal much, and I was prescribed some pain-killers. The pain soon became so bad that I began to have trouble sleeping at night – every time I turned in my sleep, the pain would jolt me wide awake, sweating and moaning. I had just become a father, and this made me feel even worse, since I felt like I was not being very useful around the house or with the baby. I was depressed and miserable – and very confused as to how life could have so quickly taken a turn like this.

The pain soon became so bad that I began to have trouble sleeping at night – every time I turned in my sleep, the pain would jolt me wide awake, sweating and moaning.

I kept plugging away at work and at home and was loath to openly admit how bad the pain had become. I was afraid that people around me would be unduly alarmed and that would make things even worse. By this time, my gait had changed, and I began using a cane during the day and pain-killers at night. I had even started drinking heavily to get some relief from the pain. But I knew that things had reached a point of inflection, and I could not continue living like this. By this time, we had moved to Boston for my wife’s new job. The drinking had gotten worse and I knew that things could very quickly spiral out of control. I kept making my rounds of the specialists in the hope of finding some answers and eventually, when they did MRIs, they diagnosed that I had avascular necrosis or AVN, which was just a fancy medical term for young man’s arthritis. It had developed to a point where it was bone on bone in the hip joints – much more so in the left hip. I had two hard choices – go under the knife and get a hip replacement or continue taking pain-killers and drinking until they both overtook me. So, I finally bit the bullet and underwent a total hip replacement on the left side. Two days after the surgery, they sent me home and I did some physical therapy over the next few weeks as part of my recovery.

As the surgical pain subsided, I began to experience a tremendous clarity of thought. I marveled at small things like the sunlight filtering in through the curtains or the birds chirping mellifluously outside my bedroom window. I realized how big a toll living with constant pain had taken on me, both physically and mentally. It was as if a part of my brain that had been solely engaged in managing my life with pain had been gifted back to me. This filled me with gratitude and gave me a better perspective on my life. I quit the job that I was in and stayed home for a few weeks recalibrating my plans. In hindsight, it was one of the best things I did. I pivoted and found a different job. More importantly, I sensed a new-found balance between work and life. I took great pleasure in embracing the simple pleasures of life – the crisp smell of an Autumn morning, the casual call from an old friend, the loving gaze from my better half, the warm hug of my son. I became, for the first time in my life, happy – at peace with myself and the world at large.

I began to use tools like the serenity prayer, meditation and my sense of gratitude for a new-found outlook on life. I learned to become more mindful and self-aware. All these years, I had been estranged from my dad, whom I blamed for a lot of my life’s missed opportunities and unfulfilled childhood dreams. I forgave him unconditionally, and in doing so, lost one of my biggest sources of anger. In reconnecting with him, I was able to reconnect with the parts of my life that I had repressed and use them anew as a source of strength and perspective.

I moved into a new job that challenged me in newer ways than merely posing technological problems. I began to develop remarkable insights into both my behavior and of those around me. I found myself developing hitherto unknown qualities such as compassion and empathy. My thoughts now constantly began to return to how to best translate these new insights into something meaningful for the folks around me that I find to be hurt, miserable, suffering and lost. I decided to enroll in a graduate management program at Tufts, ostensibly to learn some business skills but really with the idea of developing my humanistic perspective on leadership and life. I figure that anything that helps me grow into a leader of substance, would better position me to provide the benefit of my experiences and insight to the people in my team, in my business unit, in my cohort, in my peer group and all the lives that I touch. Looking back on my life, I can see that there is a lot that I have accomplished, but a lot more that I didn’t. Achieving a level of inner peace and balance has taken a long time, with a profoundly physical and mental struggle. Yet, I feel grateful that I was able to get somewhere at all and not remain angry and lost, like the young man of my youth. I feel stronger and deeper, with a clear understanding of the What and How, and have begun the journey towards finding out Why. I now realize that the goal is the journey itself. There is no way to predict or truly prepare for how life turns out. It is what it is, and the only real change that you can achieve is within, not without. And the process is continuous, without a start or end.

Let me be honest and confess I never knew what intersectionality was – had never heard of it, never ever heard of Kimberlé Crenshaw or her wonderful work. Having overheard the word in a conversation at work, I asked one of my professors about it, and he told me that “Intersectionality recognizes that identity markers (e.g. “female” and “black”) do not exist independently of each other, and that each informs the others, often creating a complex convergence of oppression… It’s a word we often hear but rarely understand, but now it seems to be a word on everyone’s lips.”

This textbook definition kind of made sense, but not really. It struck me as one of those things that is easier to read but hard to wrap your head around. And then, not too long ago, I had a moment that made me ponder about identity and its ramifications far more deeply than I ever had.

It was a Friday afternoon about a year ago in March. I was on Spring Break from my Business School classes and desperately trying to catch up on final assignments. I was just leaving the office after work and as I stepped out of the building, I got a frantic call from my brother in Mumbai. “Mom’s not doing well. She’s in the ICU, and it does not look good.” Between my getting on the train at South Station and getting out of the train at Alewife, and the pockets of dead cell reception in between, I had received the few dreaded instant messages that relayed the bad news that Mom had passed away. I reached home rather numb and began scrambling for tickets. Messages were going back and forth between my two brothers and I about whether I could make it to the funeral or not. As I sat in front of the PC, desperately looking for tickets to the next flight possible, it suddenly hit me that I could not just pack up and leave – I now needed a visa to go to Mumbai! When I had become a citizen a year ago, I had to give up my Indian passport. In one fell swoop, I experienced privilege and deprivation in the same instant.

I pondered on this a lot on my long flight to and from Mumbai. I began to understand that while  identity can be contextual it is quite critical in defining one’s life experience. And when identities overlap, the experience becomes more complex and nuanced. Intersectionality was, as my brother put it, a double or triple whammy, like someone being an immigrant, and gay and Muslim.

I then thought about what was happening around the world, the various movements dealing with overlapping oppression at multiple levels and dimensions. I began to get the feeling that understanding intersectionality is essential to combat the interwoven prejudices marginalized people face in their daily lives. Taking this a step further, I felt an intersectional look at how immigrants practiced citizenship could give us key insights into the ways in which groups marginalized by race, gender, ethnicity, class, and other social forces build and sustain communities of resistance and transformation towards social justice.

My community, the Indian-American community, is one of the fastest-growing immigrant communities in America. Today, we have close to 4 million individuals who were either born in India or report Indian ancestry or race. One of the first things people ask me when we meet for the first time, is where I am from. When I tell them where I live, they will ask me, “No, no, tell me where are you really from?” This is where the sense of alienation, of not having an identity or franchise stings. So the question becomes: Do I feel Indian enough or American enough? Or neither?

For most immigrants, including Indian-Americans, gender, class and ethnic relations get reshaped as women and men adapt to life in a foreign country. Being a woman, especially an Indian wife staying at home in America has its own poignantly interlocked oppressions. She is discriminated at home because Indians are traditionally highly patriarchal. She is also socially discriminated since her legal status is completely tied to her husband’s – it is almost as if she becomes illegal if she were to walk out of her unhappy home. And if she is plucky enough and lucky enough to find a job, she faces gender and racial inequality at work.

Who speaks for these silent sufferers who have no suffrage? In the media and our privileged circles, we only hear about the Sundar Pichais, the Satya Nadellas, the Shantanu Narayens and other successful faces of Indian immigration. Who hears about the Punjabi trucker in California who is forced to accept reduced wages or zero health benefits or lose his job?

Which brings us to the much less well-known statistic that the unauthorized Indian immigrant population has experienced one of the greatest growth rates amongst all unauthorized immigrants, increasing by 914 percent since 1990. The oppression that this segment suffers is made even worse because it is never talked about. When I was on an H1-b visa, trying to get my green card processed, I went for years without a raise or bonus since I was effectively a bonded laborer, but all that pales in comparison to some of the horror stories about undocumented immigrants.

Perhaps the most famous case would be one that a lot of us may have read about in the papers. It was about the live-in maid who worked for the Indian Deputy Consul General in New York a few years ago. She had faked her Indian nanny’s visa claiming she would pay her wages of $4500 a month, when in reality she paid her about $3 an hour for 18-19 hours of work every day. When she was arrested, she pulled strings with the Indian Foreign Ministry and got a posting to the United Nations that granted her diplomatic immunity.

A year before that, another Indian diplomat in New York, had brought over an underage Indian girl to work without pay and subjected her to barbaric treatment – seizing her passport, confining her to the apartment and forcing her to do menial labor.

Nobody really cares about these cases or the hundred others that go unreported, because they don’t concern white women, the subjects are not American, and they are probably lower caste women. In New Jersey, where attendants pump gas into your vehicle by law, many gas stations employ undocumented laborers to pump gas. They often work in abject conditions in snow and rain for bare minimum pay, often living in squalor and poverty. After 9/11, one such pump jockey was shot to death in Arizona in a racially motivated attack, since Sardarjis, or Sikhs also grow their beards long and wear turbans like devout Muslims do.

But this concept is not new: way back in 1903, W.E.B. DuBois wrote in his treatise The Souls of Black Folk that oppression does indeed operate in complicated, “interlocking” ways. Reflecting on this harsh truth and recognizing that all unique experiences of identity are valid, is how intersectionality helps change our perceptions. Using identity as one of many lenses to see the world more completely is what ends up making intersectionality the important framework that it is.

A way of expanding usefully on this idea would be to understand how discrimination plays out in different cultures. Maybe I can start by answering the question a lot of folks ask me when they meet me for the first time and ask me what religion I am. I answer that I am Hindu (as opposed to Hindi, heh heh). The most common follow up question to this is about the caste system. The caste system, which is one of the oldest forms of surviving social stratification, plays a huge role in determining privilege or oppression back home. Despite affirmative action and the Constitutional banning of discrimination, the ground reality is quite different. Caste remains a significant factor in deciding everything from family ties and cultural traditions to educational and economic opportunities, especially in small towns and villages, where more than 70% of Indians live. Nearly a third of Dalits make less than $2 a day, and many don’t have access to education or running water. Most menial jobs are carried out by Dalits; few office jobs are. Hate crimes against Dalits have proliferated in recent years.

There is also a clear divide between the rural versus urban educated elite, with a lot of social and political thought leadership getting coopted by the latter for the “greater good.”

A lot of this variance is reflected in the Indian American community, with what you see as successful immigrants being the upper caste or urban-educated elite and the undocumented “Dreamers” being of the lower caste or working-class proletariat.

Another discrimination, which is very subtle, and is also banned under the Constitution of India is that of color of skin. If you look at most popular Bollywood actresses, they appear to be very fair. This is because of a bias towards fairer skin tone. Dark-skinned heroes and heroines do not “sell.” The mental models and confirmation bias are so deep-rooted that Unilever has an extremely successful product in India called “Fair and Lovely,” which is a skin-lightening cosmetic that promises fairness of skin and loveliness of personality to users. This brand has more than a 50% market share of a $450 million market. And I could go on and on with other examples.

However, what could be really valuable is to view all these life experiences framed through intersectionality. Intersectionality becomes the organizing principle that ensures that one marginality is not substituted for another. And lived experiences are not treated as generic and undifferentiated. By mapping the fractured nature of the everyday, a lived experience allows us to be open to competing interpretations. This framework is what helps truly intersectional thinkers to be highly attentive to the points of view of different people subject to different kinds of oppression. It is what helps them to want them all to have their say, to compare their views to their own. To borrow from standpoint theory, the perspectives of marginalized and/or oppressed individuals can help to create more objective accounts of the world. Through the outsider-within phenomenon, these individuals are placed in a unique position to point to patterns of behavior that those immersed in the dominant group culture are unable to recognize. Standpoint theory gives voice to the marginalized groups by allowing them to challenge the status quo as the outsider within. And, in the process, to learn that the vast majority of African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, socioeconomically disadvantaged Americans, immigrants, Muslims, Hindus, non-Westerners, and perhaps even non-cognitive elites, among others, hold different, contrary views about how power and language work. A Level Three leader armed with such deep insights would then be able to harness high levels of productivity and motivation from all associates, regardless of their ability and origin stories and build an inclusive workplace – a truly inclusive one, in which the rainbow flag of a Pride resource, for instance, would be able to cut across boundaries and co-opt Holi, the Hindu festival of colors as their own. Or a Women’s Group would become the biggest ally of a Disabled Veterans’ Group. As John Jermier says, “if our desire is to heal the world, we will learn more about how the root mechanisms of the world work and about how things can be changed by adopting the standpoints of those people and other parts of nature that most deeply suffer its wounds.” Let’s all work towards getting there as gracefully and quickly as we can. With humility, with openness, with empathy and, most importantly, with love.