AFVOA Newsletter May 2020

Section 3 - Memoirs Newsletter No. 1 / 2020 P a g e 74 | 101 16 Stay Safe Is Not Enough – Stay Stress Free Cdr M Raghunathan Genre: Reflections any of you do not know me though some of you have met me at Palm grove Institute. Let me therefore introduce myself. I joined the Education Branch of the Indian Navy in 1963 and opted for voluntary retirement in January 1984. I did the MBA program in PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore. I tried business and got both hands burnt. Left with just my pension, I seized the opportunity to migrate to USA. I could not get a job even in McDonalds. My qualification, and my experience did not matter. So, I joined a doctoral program and survived with measly jobs in the university campus. My first job was a student worker in the cafeteria, washing dishes (plates, utensils and glasses). Six months later, I moved to shelving books in the university library. With good academic performance, I was able to secure graduate assistantship and teaching/research assistantship that took care of our livelihood and the college tuition. By the time I graduated with a PhD in MIS (Management Information Systems), my children celebrated my 'shashtiyabdapurti' (completion of sixty years of age). Fighting against age discrimination (unofficially practiced in USA and that too by Indian academia), I was lucky to get a faculty position in the College of Business at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. I taught for ten years, published a few research papers in academic journals and conference proceedings, specialized in Relational Database Management and received the Students Award for the Best MIS faculty. In 2007, considerations of my health (I had undergone a quintuple bypass surgery in 2001) and my wife's wishes led us to relocate in Chennai. We bought an apartment in West Mambalam and there we lived happily until a personal tragedy in June last year (2019) took away Kalyani after a brief illness of three days. Now, I continue to live in the same apartment, though not all that happily, but cherishing the bygone fifty-three years of togetherness. My children and the grand kids all live in USA. They all want me to get back to USA. At 81, I am not sure whether I am up to it. During the last ten months, I have learnt to live by myself. During this period, my niece and her husband visited me twice for short periods of time. That is commendable since they reside in Hyderabad. I have scores of relatives in Chennai, who do not even call me over the phone. A few friends of mine call me regularly over the phone. Two of them are former colleagues of mine in the Indian Navy M