Kanwal Rekhi
Archive

January 2016

Browsing
In Personal History

1969/1970

No Comments

I graduated from Michigan Tech in the summer of 1969. I got a couple of job offers, and took one with EAI in New Jersey. It was about 30 miles south of NYC. My friend Umesh Malhotra and his brother Girish were already in NJ. It was a very good job as a hardware engineer with a minicomputer company, paying really well. I bought a new Ford Maverick and rented a nice furnished apartment. As summer turned into fall, I was having the time of my life enjoying new found freedom. There very few Indians in the US back then. We did not mind traveling 100 miles to visit friends.

by
Read More
In India

Rajiv Gandhi

1 Comment

article-2570586-1BEBF51C00000578-469_306x423
Rajiv became the fifth Prime Minister of India in 1984 after the murder of his mother India Gandhi. He had no political experience, he was an airline pilot when he had been inducted by the party as a dynastic succession. It was a generational change in many ways. He was in his forties and grew up in independent India.

by
Read More
In Personal History

More on 1969

No Comments

I almost forgot to mention the two main events of the summer of 1969: the moon landing and the Woodstock festival in upstate New York. I was still in Houghton when the moon landing happened and left soon after for New Jersey. The big news when I got there was this first ever open field drug/sex/music festival where tens of thousands people, it might have been hundreds of thousands, camped out in the open field for several days. It was a peak of hippie culture of make love not war!

by
Read More
In India

India’s Prime Ministers

2 Comments

India has had 15 prime minsters since independence. 6 have served a full term or more. I wanted to reflect and assess their performance, especially with respect to their impact on the economy.

Unless I am missing somebody, here the fifteen:
Jawaharlal Nehru, Guljarilal Nanda, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi, Morarjee Desai, Charan Singh, Rajeev Gandhi, VP Singh, Chandra Sekhar, Narasimhan Rao, Deve Gowda, IP Gujral, Atal Bihar Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi.

by
Read More