Author: Gene Warner
Publication: The Buffalo News
Date: July 30, 2007
URL: http://www.buffalonews.com/home/story/130068.html
Dr. Kumar Bahuleyan went from extreme poverty
to lavish living, only to find joy after donating his fortune to his village
in India
He was born into the "untouchable"
caste in India, so poor that he didn't wear his first pair of shoes until
he went to medical school.
Then he came to America, where he made millions
as a Buffalo neurosurgeon and lived a lavish life, once owning a Rolls-Royce,
five Mercedes-Benzes and an airplane.
But he felt empty, almost soulless. So he
donated his personal fortune - some $20 million - to establish a neurosurgery
hospital, a health clinic and a spa resort in his native Indian village, Chemmanakary.
Now, at 81, Dr. Kumar Bahuleyan has come full
circle: from dire poverty in India, to the lifestyles of the rich in America
and back to his native village, where he's traded his Mercedes for a bicycle.
"I was born with nothing; I was educated
by the people of that village, and this is what I owe to them," Bahuleyan
said recently in Buffalo.
"I'm in a state of nirvana, eternal nirvana,"
he said. "I have nothing else to achieve in life. This was my goal, to
help my people. I can die any time, as a happy man."
The Bahuleyan story seems almost too good
to be true, a rags-toriches story that has taken him back to his impoverished
roots.
Another Indian native, Dr. Pearay Ogra, the
former chief of infectious diseases at Women & Children's Hospital and
the president of the Bahuleyan Charitable Foundation, said he believes he
understands why Bahuleyan donated his fortune.
"He grew up in a traditional Hindu culture,
with a deep sense of universal giving," Ogra said. "If you can afford
it, give it back to the people who brought you up."
Others are moved by Bahuleyan's infectious
spirit and energy.
One is Bill Zimmermann, executive director
of a Buffalo sailing school who is helping Bahuleyan set up a sailing and
boatbuilding school in Chemmanakary. The venture is designed to teach sailing
and boatbuilding skills to the Indian villagers, provide more jobs and use
its profits to help fund medical treatment for the villagers.
Once Bahuleyan got hooked on the concept,
he started spending 50 hours a week at Zimmerman's Seven Seas Sailing School,
located on the Buffalo ship canal, trying to learn about his latest venture.
"He's not mesmerizing or evangelical,
but he seems like a living saint," Zimmermann said. "He does nothing
but imbue a sense of calm and decency. He brings out the best in you."
Bahuleyan has never told his full story before
in Buffalo, where he has lived since 1973.
Miserable conditions
One reason may be the kind of reaction he
got when a young woman, after hearing about all his charitable works in India,
approached him at Seven Seas a few weeks ago. If he made his fortune in Western
New York, she asked, why didn't he donate primarily to the many needy charities
here?
Buffalo and Western New York, he replied,
don't need his help as badly as those in his native village, where he knew
firsthand the extreme misery and poverty. That feeling fueled his passionate
desire to give back to that village.
About 20 to 25 years ago, when he was earning
a fortune as a neurosurgeon, Bahuleyan returned to Chemmanakary and was struck
by how little it had changed.
"This village remained absolutely the
same - not a road, no school, no water supply, no sanitary facilities,"
he said. "I looked in the [people's] faces and saw the same people living
in the same miserable conditions I had grown up with." Ogra put it another
way.
"For the kind of poverty he's dealing
with in southern India, there is no other outlet for support," he said.
It's impossible to understand Bahuleyan without
learning more about those "miserable conditions" he came from- including
the cries of anguish from his dying brothers and sister in the 1930s. Two
younger brothers and a sister, all under 8 years old, died of roundworm infestation
after drinking polluted water, he said.
"I was the oldest, feeling very helpless,
listening to the screams of these dying children, one by one," he said.
"Their cries stuck in my psyche. Even now it haunts me."
Bahuleyan suffered from smallpox and typhoid
fever..
"The good Lord saved me for a purpose,"
he said. "I believe that, even today."
As an "untouchable," Bahuleyan had
to take a roundabout route to school because he wasn't allowed to pass within
a few hundred yards of the Hindu temple, even though he was born a Hindu.
Bahuleyan never saw ice cream until he was
in medical college in his early 20s. And he remembers buying his first pair
of shoes as a young adult; he put the right shoe on his left foot and realized
it didn't fit.
Excessive spending
Bahuleyan had attended a lower-caste school
and reached the top level at age 12 or 13. Only a chance encounter between
his father and the headmaster of a Brahmin-run, English- speaking school got
him into that school, where he never paid a penny.
A star student, he went to high school, then
a premedical school run by Christian miss ionaries before attending medical
college in Madras, now called Chennai.
The local government in Kerala sent him to
the United Kingdom for neurosurgical training at a college in Edinburgh, Scotland,
where he spent six years before returning home. But he couldn't land a job
in his specialty.
"They didn't know what to do with me,"
he said. "There was no position available for a neurosurgeon. Many people
didn't know what neurosurgery was."
So Bahuleyan went to Kingston, Ont., then
Albany Medical College, before coming to Buffalo in 1973 to work with neurosurgeon
Dr. John Zoll. During his 26-year career, Bahuleyan was in private practice,
with offices on Linwood and Kenmore avenues and Main Street. He also served
as a clinical associate professor in neurosurgery at the University at Buffalo
before retiring in 1999. And he made millions.
"I didn't ask for the money," he
said. "The money came to me. My secretary said to me, 'Dr. Bahuleyan,
you're making too much money.' I had never had any money. So I went berserk
with money."
Bahuleyan also earned a reputation as a shrewd
investor, both here and in India.
But his most outrageous moment may have come
one day in the 1980s, when he walked into the Mercedes-Benz dealer - ship
and eyed a 500SL.
He asked the salesman how much the car cost.
The sticker price was $115,000, he was told.
"Here is my credit card," Bahuleyan
replied.
Bahuleyan talks about his spending sprees
as if he were talking about someone else.
"I compare it to a kid who gets a toy,
plays with it, throws it away and gets another toy," he said. "I
knew it was wrong, but I didn't care. It was the hedonistic phase of my life."
It slowly dawned on Bahuleyan, especially
after he went back to India, that he was getting no joy from his lifestyle.
"I woke up in the morning feeling terrible,"
he said. "I kept asking myself, 'What am I doing?' "
Long-range plans
So in 1989, he set up the Bahuleyan Charitable
Foundation, which built a small clinic in Indai for young children and pregnant
women in 1993, while also installing latrines, roads and a water supply for
the villagers. Bahuleyan's foundation built the Indo-American Hospital Brain
and Spine Centre in 1996, starting with 80 beds.
None of the facilities carries his name.
"They wanted to glorify me and put the
hospital and a road in my name," he said. "I said 'No.' The whole
idea was one of selfless service."
His grandiose plans were flawed, though. His
emotions had fueled all his efforts, stopping him from making a realistic
plan that would be financially viable. He needed a profitable venture to fund
his efforts.
In 2004, the foundation opened the Kalathil
Health Resorts, offering luxury rooms, health spas and exercise rooms, and
catering to India's burgeoning middle class.
Bahuleyan's next brainstorm brought him back
to Buffalo, where he came up with the idea for the new East India Seven Seas
Sailing Co.
Early this summer, Bahuleyan went to the Seven
Seas Sailing School, where he had learned to sail 26 years earlier. Within
days, Seven Seas officials were thrilled with his plan for setting up the
sailing school in the southwestern corner of India near the Arabian Sea.
Four sailboats, all 22- to 26- footers, are
being shipped to India next month, and at least three Western New Yorkers
are heading there this fall to help set up the school.
The long-range plan calls for the new East
India Seven Seas Sailing Co. to accept applications from Western New York
couples willing to spend a few weeks in India, to volunteer in Bahuleyan's
hospital and to teach sailing, as part of the "Sailors Who Heal"
program.
"You don't see India's recreational tourism
ports dotted with sailboats," Zimmermann said. "We're going to change
that, with our Sailors Who Heal program from Buffalo."
The sailing school, to be run in conjunction
with the health resort, will open with a zero-interest loan from the foundation.
Eventually, school officials expect their profits will pay off the loan, with
future profits going to the hospital.
"If I charge more [for the health services]
to the poor people, they will go without the services, or they will have to
sell their own house," Bahuleyan said. "But I can charge any amount
of money the market will bear for a luxurious health resort and to teach them
sailing and boatbuilding."
Bahuleyan, who lives in Buffalo with his wife,
pathologist Dr. Indira Kartha, now spends half the year here, the other half
in India. In his native land, he oversees his foundation's work, gets around
on a bicycle and still does almost daily surgery.
"My dream is to see this all running
without my help, so I can pass away peacefully, knowing that I created something
and gave something back," he said.
"That would justify my existence."
gwarner@buffnews.com
===============================
Dr. Kumar Bahuleyan
URL: http://www.vyaparinet.com/1oldweb/IndoAmerican/indohtml/drbahuleyan.htm
PERSONALITY
All it takes is a dream
He had a dream- of turning around his godforsaken village and improving the
lot of its people. Unlike other NRIs he came back to India and spent all of
his money to achieve this goal.
Chemmanakary 1989
An apology for a village, it was a minuscule swampy hinterland. Unemployment
was high, there was no sanitation, potable drinking water or healthcare. Majority
of the underprivileged inhabitants were caught in a vortex of poverty, starvation
and deprivation. Survival was tough and escape from the quagmire-an impossible
dream.
Chemmanakary 1999
Paddy-fields and tiled houses dot the palm-fringed landscape. A tarred road
links Chemmanakary to the rest of Vaikom taluk. Cold storages, provision stores,
medical shops, healthcare centres and a super speciality hospital are now
a part of the effervescent village, that is clearly on the move.
Chemmanakary's transformation took shape in
the hands of a neurosurgeon, Kumar Bahuleyan, who invested his enormous private
fortune to better the lives of his country cousins.
Born to a physician in the village, times
were hard for the poor family. Young Bahuleyan was one of the two survivors
in a family of five; three of his siblings died in their childhood. Fighting
disease and hunger every step of the way, Bahuleyan struggled to get an education.
The young boy's grit and sheer brilliance carried him through, with the help
of many benefactors and government scholarships he went on to acquire a medical
degree. Life was no cake walk, but " I am an eternal optimist",he
says.
Bahuleyan's career, goaded by his ability
to circumvent, started going places- the Kerala Government sent him to the
UK for neurosurgical training as the state did not have a neurosurgeon at
that time. He returned home to the Chinese aggression; the army gobbled him
up for the armed forces did not have a qualified neurosurgeon.
Three years later he discovered " the
Kerala Government did not have a place for me; my post had been filled by
a freshman". He, a qualified neurosurgeon, had to sit at home twiddling
his thumbs waiting for bureaucratic red tape to work around his case. His
patience wore thin and a disgusted Bahuleyan fled to Ontario, Canada, seeking
employment. He eventually ended up in Buffalo, USA, where for the first time
in his life he achieved economic security.
Even as he was scaling professional heights,
Bahuleyan used to visit Chemmanakary regularly. Fifty years after Independence,
the village still did not have potable drinking water, sanitation, electricity,
roads and health centres. "Even marginally well-off people had no concept
of sanitation", said
Bahuleyan. "Chemmanakary was a beautiful village contaminated by the
people's lack of awareness".
The emotionally aroused doctor was determined
to "clean up the mess" and in 1989 established a not-for-profit-private
organization to bring basic healthcare to Kerala villages. " I put all
my money of more than Rs 10 crore into the foundation. My attempt was to come
back here and do some community work," he says.
The Bahuleyan Charitable Foundation began
with a health survey to pick a target area. It chose an area comprising 17
sq. miles with a population of 66,356. The foundation plunged into a latrine
construction programme in this area where 5009 of the 18,362 houses did not
have latrines. So far 619 latrines meeting WHO standards and costing Rs 4,000
each have been built. "The people initially had no clue what to do with
a latrine and started using it as a store room," says Bahuleyan.
In 1993 the foundation built a small clinic
in the village to treat pregnant women and children. Demand was so high in
spite of poor accessibility (there were no roads leading to the clinic), that
the centre was soon upgraded and moved to Vaikom town. The foundation also
spent Rs 50 lakh to construct a 6 km road to the main highway and subsidiary
roads to link the clinic.
The Vaikom wing of The Indo-American Hospital
opened in 1995 with 30 beds. " It was named to highlight the fact that
it is built with the money I earned in the U.S. and to acknowledge the American
tax payer's contribution," explained the doctor.
But with most of the patients being poor the
hospital was making little by way of revenue and its very existence was threatened.
" I started this whole project out of my sentiments, with no planning,"
said Bahuleyan. "However I realized I had to do something revenue generating
to make it viable."
A project consultant was roped in and he suggested the idea of building a
super specialty hospital to attract paying patients. "We decided to have
a neuro centre in Chemmanakary and opened with the most modern equipment in
November 1996."
A super specialty hospital in the hinterlands?
"Why not?" asked the doctor."
Hospitals are all built in cities which are inaccessible to the villagers.
I want to develop my village and its economy. Treatment here is at roughly
one-third the cost of city hospitals and free on cost for the poor."
The hospital today is the hub of life in Chemmanakary.
Indeed a far cry from the early days when the villagers viewed Bahuleyan and
his motives with suspicion.
Most of the work force in the hospital is
locally drawn, except for the specialized slots. " Thanks to the hospital,
our youth have a channel of employment. Agriculture has received an impetus
and the general quality of life here has improved." Said Sivaramakrishnan,
62. "Our sick people do not die for want of medical attention any more,"
said Zuhara Begum, 45. "What more do we need?"
According to Bahuleyan if "all the NRIs
adopted a village each in India and did something for its people, underdevelopment
in this country would soon be a thing of the past. When I hear these so-called
NRIs crib about the lack of facilities here I tell them that the problem is
with them and not with the country, It's they who have changed, not the land-
after all, weren't they living here at one point in time? They come back and
build huge mansions, with that money I can build 100 or more latrines. Don't
we all owe a little something to our motherland?"
Though he pleads guilty of having strayed
from his original vision of bringing general healthcare assistance to Chemmanakary,
Bahuleyan says that he is taking steps to rectify this. He plans to upgrade
the Vaikom clinic into a centre of excellence for women and children.
A multilingual learning centre is also under
construction where the doctor plans to introduce computers and Internet facilities."
" I am targeting the children here, " he says. " I want to
take them off the streets so that in future even the specialized posts in
the hospital can be filled by local hands."
The doctor claims to be a "in a state of nirvana" today. He says:
" I am a dreamer; a professor of ideas. Everything I have achieved in
my life is because of my dreams."
"I have also done some unpardonable things
in my life," he says with a laugh. "But for a village boy desperate
to do something, the world didn't offer very many choices."
However, it's yesterday no more; the little
boy has grown up and today the world is his oyster. And Chemmanakary has finally
made it to the map and the millennium- electricity, drinking water, health
care and all.
