Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer prize winner, laadla beta

Sandip Roy I have a sinking feeling that mothers of India Americans all over the world must be saying, “Beta, when will I get a call at 1 am in the night like Siddhartha Mukherjee’s mother?” Mukherjee, of course, just won the Pulitzer for his opus, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. The headline in the Indian Express reads, “In the dead of night, the phone rang: Ma, I just won the Pulitzer.” Congratulations and sandesh all around. But this might be bad news for all other Indian Americans. A doctor AND a Pulitzer winner. Keeping up with the Mukherjees just got a little harder. Indian Americans have long lapped up the fact that they are the model minority. There are some 200,000 Indian American millionaires, over 41,000 doctors. When Indian Americans don’t make it to the finals of the National Spelling Bee, that makes news. Actually now there’s such an outbreak of Indian Americans in the U.S. National Spelling Bee, there’s a whole Metlife-sponsored South Asian-only spelling bee. I remember asking one of the kids (who at 13 was already a veteran) whether he liked doing it. He shrugged. He preferred TV, sports, he said. But he did it because his parents loved it and he was good at it. After he lost, I asked him what he had learned. “A lot of words,” he said. “What I still haven’t learned is how to cope with failure.” The Indian American success story leaves little room for failure. Jhumpa Lahiri writes her first book. She wins a Pulitzer. Kiran Desai writes her first novel. She wins the Booker. Siddhartha Mukherjee writes his first book. He wins a Pulitzer. It’s not enough to be the first-class minority, you have to be the first-class first minority. “Doesn’t anyone’s child ever come second in anything anymore?” wondered a friend after listening to a group of Indian mothers at a potluck. A few years ago Kaavya Viswanathanmade headlines when she landed a half-million dollar book deal while still in high school for her chick-lit novel. In that book How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, Mehta’s parents actually had master plans for her life with handy MBA-style acronyms – HOWGIH (How Opal Will Get Into Harvard) and HOWGAL (How Opal Will Get a Life). It would have been funny except Viswanathan plagiarized the whole book . But later it turned out that she wanted to be an investment banker, and write bestselling chick-lit and win the Booker. No wonder she took one terrible life-altering short cut that brought her world crashing down all around her. Luckily the world didn’t end - she recovered, went to Georgetown Law School and landed a good job eventually. But most Indian Americans will only remember her fall from grace. I have nothing against a quest for excellence. I just worry that this race to the top is also a race to conformity, that leaves little room for those who don’t fit into the shiny brown stereotype. Siddhartha Mukherjee will no doubt be a great role model for the community. I just have a dreadful feeling that some poor Indian American boy will tell his parents one day “Mom, Dad, I don’t want to become a doctor. I want to be a writer.” And the parents will smile and say, “But darling, you can first become a doctor. AND then you can win the Pulitzer. Just look at that nice Siddhartha Mukherjee.”   Lakshmi Chaudhry Each time I or my brothers landed a new job or (gasp!) a promotion it would prompt a parental inquisition: what title, how much salary, etc. Appa would whip out his battered diary and jot down the details just in case his aging memory failed right in the midst of his already-planned rounds of bragging. As for my mother, each achievement was merely more proof of greatness foretold. Senior reporter at a prestigious magazine? Only to be expected for the child who wrote an incisive three-line essay on a pigeon at age five. There are many burdens of being a laadla spawn – amusing proof of which is splashed across the pages of the Hindustan Times this morning. Landing a middling media job is bad enough, but when it comes to potential of filial embarrasment, winning a Pulitzer Prize is an outright disaster. “In 1970, the year he was born, I helped build the temple. When he came home for his Rhodes scholarship exam, the interview fell on the temple’s anniversary. Even before the result was announced, I knew Sid would get the scholarship," Siddharth Mukherjee’s father Sibeswar told reporters. Translation: My son is a goddamn miracle. Need more?:

Young Siddharth’s mental prowess was evident at the age of five, says his mother Chandana. “During the admission interview to St. Columba’s, the principal asked him four questions. Siddhartha answered all four so well that the principal likened his memory to Mahatma Gandhi’s,” she recalled.

And if the Mahatma ain’t good enough for you, try and beat this one: “He even worked in a play with actor Shah Rukh Khan, six years his senior.” Game, set, and match. Next up: A triumphant round of the Mukherjee family circuit with poor Sid (and his Pulitzer prize) in tow.