I arrived at IIM from Delhi with a Bachelor’s in Physics - neither an engineer nor an accountant nor an economist – yes, an odd ball. 

 

Post-IIMA, I started (along with batchmate Vijayraghavan) at the Programme Analysis Group, in the Department of Atomic Energy, in Bombay and worked for over five years under Dr. Homi Sethna, the then Chairman of Atomic Energy Commission before coming to the US. 

 

Having completed my doctoral studies at Carnegie Mellon University, I started my academic career as a faculty at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business where I stayed from 1988 through 1996. In 1996 I joined the University of Illinois at Chicago and have been there since. Ironically (but thanks to Prof Govindarajan and John Camillus!!!), I have been earning my livelihood teaching ManAcc I and ManAcc II to generations of MBA students both in the US and India (ISB). 

 

I have had the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of undocumented, underprivileged and first generation Americans who constitute a significant component of our student body. As an academic accountant, I spend much of my time in research, and my greatest satisfaction has been that some of the research made its way into the Wall Street Journal.

 

Married in November 1989 in Berkeley, California, I and my wife Soma have raised a son Amartya, now twenty-one and a senior in College and a daughter, Anjali, now eighteen and a freshman in College. Anjali recently did her Bhartanatyam Arangetram after about 14 years of training under the acclaimed Guru Hema Rajagopalan, who incidentally turned out to be Chinu Srinivasan’s (PGP 1975) elder sister. 

 

Soma, a molecular geneticist, is on the faculty in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago, and enjoys hiking, reading, and gardening and is a movie buff like me. Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, a few miles south of downtown, campus of the University of Chicago, home to President Obama and his Presidential Library has been home to us for over twenty years with Raaj Sah (PGP 75) as a close neighbor.