The American Dream

In September of 1964, just weeks after President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, my father, Bharat, left a small manufacturing town in rural India as an immigrant to the United States. In search of the American Dream, Dad arrived in Knoxville, TN, as a college student and found himself in a country torn by a crisis of compassion. Later that same year, he saw Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. accept the Nobel Prize for Peace and heard his hopeful remarks that “Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts. Sooner or later, all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together