The man who straddled two countries

I was struggling with the coffee maker when he appeared beside me. "Can I help?” he asked, not waiting for an answer. He brewed a cup, placed it on a tray, and led me to an adjoining foyer. It was the coffee break between two sessions of a seminar titled “Discrimination in the Newsroom.”

“Is it there in your newspaper?” he asked. “If it was, I would not be here,” I answered.

He smiled. That was Peter Bhatia, Stanford graduate and advisor to leading journalism schools in the US; editor of America’s most influential regional newspaper; 2003 president elect of the American Society of Newspaper Editors; Pulitzer juror and leader of six Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper projects, including three for his own, The Oregonian. The senior-most editor is of South Asian origin and is proud of his Rajasthani roots.

“The problem with being an Indian here is that this country does not understand India,” he said abruptly.

I asked him how long he had lived in America. “I was born here,” he answered. “I went to India in the 1970s to meet my father’s family. I went to Lucknow, where my grandfather was a district surgeon, and I saw our ancestral home there. The place where my father grew up, went to school, and completed his undergraduate education.”

He hoped to bring his two children, Megan and Jalen, to India some day “to know their roots.”

Peter Bhatia’s father, Vishnu Narain, came to the University of Iowa in 1947 to complete a doctoral programme in education. He returned to India with a degree and a foreign bride. Bhatia describes this alliance as “between a dark-skinned Indian and a strawberry blonde from Chicago,” a tough proposition in a country that had just freed itself from white supremacy. Vishnu Narain had no choice but to return to his adopted land. He took up a position at Washington State University, where he continued for the next 45 years to become an institution himself.

Describing a man who lived in his adopted land “with an unbowed attitude,” Vishnu Narain was “the epitome of class.”

I am proud of my father and my Indian roots,” says Bhatia. “I am proud to belong to a great tradition.” Schooled in Pullman, Bhatia moved to Stanford University, “which opened up a world of possibilities I never dreamed of.” He settled for a career in journalism because “this was one career “where good work does not go unnoticed.”

Bhatia was preoccupied with his father’s failing health. He knew that he must take his ashes back to the land of his birth.”

“He is the only tangible link with India that my children have,” he said sadly. “Once he goes, that is gone!” Then he added brightly, “Do you know I have made a deal with my father to see me become president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors next year? He has promised me he would!”