DEPARTED FROM
Hyderabad, India
ARRIVED IN
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
YEAR
1981
AGE
13
NOW LIVES IN
Austin, Texas
TRANSCRIPT
My name is Dr. Andy Joshi, and I am a first-generation immigrant from India, born in 1969 in Nashik, India, to two physicians--my mom was an ayurvedic physician and my dad is an ear, nose, and throat surgeon. My dad liked to travel, he liked to go places, and so we were always going places from the day I was born, I think a few days old, and was not born in my dad’s town, I was born actually in my mother’s hometown; she went for maternity. At 6 months my dad got a scholarship, as was common in those days...the British rule and the British Raj ended and many scholarships were granted as part of the separation. And my dad got a scholarship to become a surgeon in England, a Fellow of the Royal College of Scotland, or FRCS as it was called, and he was very happy to be one of the few that earned that scholarship. So we moved to England. My first eight years of life were in England, and the real culture shock actually was moving back to India at age eight. We moved to a place--Hyderabad, India, which was full, even to this day, of tensions of political and racial types, and there were riots and burning buses and school closings. So it was really a big huge culture shock to go from the Western system to the Indian system--toilets, streets, cars, bicycles. I didn’t actually understand the language very well. I had to learn Hindi and Telugu; my native tongue being Marathi, which we spoke in our home. There were two foreign languages I had to learn immediately, [and] Sanskrit...the lucky thing was that I was put in a grammar school, which is a British school. So when I turned twelve, my dad moved to the United States; it wasn’t really a big shock for me, it was actually almost a homecoming to come to Darby, Pennsylvania. From Darby, we went to Ohio, where my dad was a resident at Case Western Reserve, and then we moved to the small town of Minden, Louisiana, which also wasn’t as shocking as going from the West to the East. And then I found my home; my first move was to Houston, Texas, and I’ve been in Texas ever since my residency, 1992, and Austin is the first place that I’ve ever felt at home, and given my original moving around so much with my family, I don’t ever plan to leave here.
