Mending Lives

Jane_Houng: [00:00:00] Hi, I'm Jane Hong, and this is Mending Lives, where I'm talking with people from a patchwork of places. Some have had their lives ripped apart by loss, some are in the business of repairing others brokenness, but we're all seeking to make this world more beautiful.

Ravi Shankar is a well known American poet, editor, and author of more than 15 books. He's also the founder of Drunken Boat, one of the world's first electronic journals of the arts. He's been featured in the New York Times and on the BBC, NPR, and PBS NewsHour, and this year delivered a TEDx tough talk entitled Resilience Through Reciprocity.

Ravi turned his hand to memoir with Correctional, published in 2022 by the University of Wisconsin. In this episode, he [00:01:00] talks about his experience of being incarcerated at Hartford Correctional Center, a level four high security jail in Connecticut, and expands on his views on social justice, structural racism, and the US penal system. He also shares the challenges of being raised a second generation Indian immigrant. I first met Ravi in Hong Kong when he was a tutor for the City University of Hong Kong's creative writing program. He went on to become a literary professor at Central Connecticut State University. This chat was recorded in Nepal, where I had the very good fortune to reconnect with him as part of the New York Writers Workshop.

Jane_Houng: Dear Ravi, thank you so very much for being here this afternoon on what must have been another very busy day in Pokhara.

Ravi Shakar: Oh, today actually was a pretty divine day. As you know, we've been spending the last week in Nepal. Today I went with a fellow poet, Sudeep Sen, and a couple of guests, Tony Barnstone and Ruth Dannen, up to a little kind of Ayurvedic retreat place dedicated to global conscience. Up in the hillsides of Pokhara, looking down at the valley, And we had this wonderful, sustainable food that's grown right there and walked around and so I feel pretty tranquil.

Jane_Houng: I'm reminded of the first panel you gave and it was called The Divine and Derelict. Maybe we can go to both in this podcast. Divine. This is a divine place. There's something about the force [00:03:00] of the mountains I feel here. I feel it. Spiritually, I'm envious that I didn't have the experience that you had today.

Ravi Shakar: It sounds like you've seen some wonderful things, and I absolutely agree. I mean, something about South Asia, there's this conflation of the divine and the derelict or the discarded, if you will. You will see this rubbish and trash or impoverishment on a level that's hard to fathom right next to these wonderful temples and these places of worship. And the thing I love about Nepalese culture is it's really syncretic. So you'll see a Buddhist stupa next to a Hindu temple next to a mosque. And there seems to be an interchange rather than a division between them.

Jane_Houng: And for you as a native Indian, but a second generation immigrant from the States. Maybe there's some resonance there that I don't feel as a native whitey from the UK.

Ravi Shakar: Yes, well, you know, I was born in [00:04:00] the U. S. but my parents emigrated to the country, to the United States in the late 1960s. And then I went back to India when I was a young boy and I lived there from about the ages of eight to ten. And so I've always had this sense of being part of two worlds, two cultures, but never really fitting in either one. Which is part of one of the themes that I explore in the memoir, Correctional.

Jane_Houng: And what do you think about that idea that as a writer it's a blessing to be able to be objective. You know, that you don't fit comfortably anywhere really.

Ravi Shakar: I think it is the kind of discomfort, the thing about being another in a way and I certainly was growing up in a Northern Virginia town in Manassas, Virginia known for the Battle of Bull Run and Lorena Bobbitt. Not the most cosmopolitan place on Earth. My family was the only South Asian family around. And so I was, though I wanted desperately to assimilate, I was an American kid. I found it very difficult and my mom would make me these [00:05:00] wonderful things. What I wouldn't do for those now, but every day on the way to the school bus, I would dump out my lunchbox because I would have been teased for having curries and other things. And then this moment I talked to you about while my grandmother got ill in Indian society, there's this idea of Dharma duty. And family comes above all. And so we just picked up and uprooted and moved from Virginia back to India. And all of a sudden I was in an Indian school and lo and behold. I was an American there. The kids used to say that my accent sounded like John Wayne.

Jane_Houng: Maybe you adjusted really fast to try to get into the in crowd at the time.

Ravi Shakar: Well, I did realize, and perhaps it's because I grew up in America and I drank a lot of vitamin D milk. I was kind of bigger and stronger than most of the Indian kids around me. And so I was able to hold my own in the playground brawls and. But that sense when you're an outsider, I think it makes you much more deeply observant [00:06:00] to everything that's taking place around you and so that sense of exile or dislocation I think was really fundamental in turning me into a writer.

Jane_Houng: And you mentioned already your memoir biography, let's call it a biography Ravi called Correctional. And what I remember particularly about the opening chapter was that you were in India and you were at a temple and but then there was this kind of juxtaposition about who you were and that, that conflict. Is it a, would you say it's a conflict between your culture and your upbringing and your life as an American?

Ravi Shakar: Yes, absolutely. Now I feel very lucky and enriched to have two cultures to draw from. But as a young kid, I felt equally alienated from both. And so, I realized very early on that in order to be the perfect kind of, Tambram son, a Tamilian Brahmin son, which, of course, has its own very strict code of [00:07:00] behavior. My parents are total vegetarians, they're teetotalers, have never had a sip of alcohol, never done any drugs, never eaten any meat. That Actually, this identity was quite a liability when it came to American school, and so I had to learn very early on to do a little shape shifting. I would kind of present a certain face at home, and then I would go out into the world, and I found particularly that I, would take risks. I would act out a little bit in order to kind of quell the stereotypical notion of me as this geeky little Indian boy who was really good at school, which of course was the case, but wasn't doing me any benefit when it came to my social adjustment.

Jane_Houng: At what stage did you take refuge in reading and writing?

Ravi Shakar: Early on. I think I was a pretty early reader and I was a voracious reader and I found a sense of great escape in books from a very young age and so I was always reading everything [00:08:00] from the sides of cereal boxes to magazines in doctor's offices to the kinds of books that I loved as a kid, or the Hardy Boys and fantasy novels and Long after my curfew, I would stay up sometimes under the bedsheets with a flashlight to continue reading. And I also really enjoyed expressing myself through language. I never expected that would become a vocation because in South Asia there's a big tendency and bias towards the sciences. My father is a mechanical engineer. I have doctors and lawyers and accountants in my family. Writer is not, and poet certainly, was not something that anyone did and that my parents still to this very day don't really quite imagine how I can make my living as a writer. And so there was a lot of resistance that I had to overcome in order to achieve what it is that I'm truly passionate about. And when did you have the [00:09:00] courage to speak out about that? You know, I think it was not until I was in university. I mean, I still up until high school, I thought I would be an aeronautical engineer. I was actually quite good at math and science. I went to a science and technology magnet school. But when I was an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, initially I was actually enrolled in the engineering school. But the first semester of the multivariable classes and the smell of the engineering computer lab made me realize this is not the place I wanted to spend four years. I also simultaneously had the great good fortune of taking my very first writing classes. And so I had a wonderful instructor, Lisa Raspar, a terrific poet. At UVA I got to study with Rita Dove and Greg Orr and Charles Wright. Some amazing poets and I was given a lot of confidence that this is something that I was good at, I was validated in doing, and so I decided to [00:10:00] switch my major, and I still remember the conversation I had probably at the end of my first year, and I was met with incredulity and anger even, that why would I make such a decision? The humanities were not considered in India. You only study the humanities if you're an utter failure at everything else. So the sense of, why are you doing this thing that's not gonna earn you money or stability? But at that point I determined it really was what I was passionate about and I was gonna push it as far as I could to see what would happen. I wanted to live my life doing something I actually enjoyed.

Jane_Houng: And what actually happened? You graduated and then?

Ravi Shakar: Yes. So when I I finished at the University of Virginia, I was a modern studies major, actually, which was an interdisciplinary program in the English department. And I subsequently moved to the Bay Area, to San Francisco, when I finished college, and I worked in publishing. I was an editorial [00:11:00] assistant at a couple of magazines, and I did that for a couple of years, and I realized I really do want to be on the other side of it. And so, I applied to and got into the MFA program in creative writing at Columbia University. And that's when I moved back to New York City. I moved in with my then girlfriend, who would become my first wife. And that was really the start of my journey as a writer.

Jane_Houng: And what a privilege, an Ivy League university. A fantastic creative writing program, right? So, I mean, that must have been a catalyst to so much of what you've done in the future.

Ravi Shakar: Yeah, and I think also being in New York was a huge part of it. I mean, it's one of the places and I mentioned in Correctional that this place that I considered home became a place where I felt quite alienated later in my life. But at the time, I had thoroughly romanticized New York from Gershwin, to Woody Allen movies, to all of the great writing [00:12:00] Catcher in the Rye that takes place in Central Park. And I found in New York that my expectations were actually exceeded. There was so much happening in the city. All of the time I was a reader for the Paris Review, which at the time was at George p Clinton's brownstone down in the basement. I was interacting with artists and other creative people. I got to actually some of the best classes I took at Columbia outside of the writing program.

Jane_Houng: Like what.

Ravi Shakar: I remember a class I took on, nietzche and Shamanism with Michael Sig, an anthropology professor, which was quite fabulous. And took a film class with Annette Inor. And I took a philosophy class well as when I was an undergraduate with Richard Roraty. And so I was very much interested in all of these different kind of interdisciplinary connections. And I also made some really good friends. The thing about Columbia. Both for the good and for the bad, it was a highly competitive program, and back in the mid 90s when I was there, there were [00:13:00] still graduates, well, particularly fiction writers, not so much as poets, but graduates getting six figure advances based on their thesis manuscript, and there was this very rich sense of the possibilities of creative writing, and absolutely I think it was a launching pad into everything that I would come to do.

Jane_Houng: I'd like to tell our listeners that I first met you when you were a mentor for the City University Creative Writing Program in Hong Kong. And yeah, you'd, you know, you'd come in from New York and all the local poets, not just locals, but actually anyone who'd enrolled on the poetry strand, they were all craving to work with you. And I heard so many complimentary remarks about your classes and the way, you know, the depth in which you went into people's poetry and the inspiration you gave people.

Ravi Shakar: Oh, that's very kind of you to say, Jane. Yes, that program, I think, was one of the most fabulous [00:14:00] pedagogical experiences of my life, in part due to students like you.

Jane_Houng: Wow, you flatter me.

Ravi Shakar: From around the world, I mean, from Hong Kong, and from Australia, and from India. And it was a low residency program, so I didn't live in Hong Kong, but as you said twice a year I would come with some folks I'm still dear friends with, Tina Chang, and James Scudamore, and Shu Shi, who ran the program. And we would spend two weeks intensively working with these students. And I think that was one of the places I discovered that I loved teaching almost as much as I loved writing. There was something, and that's why I think I still do it today. There's something different happens in the classroom every single day. And when there's this moment where there's an exchange of ideas and a transformation happening, oftentimes, not one that I have directed, I try to help shepherd the conversation along, but the dialogue that students have with one another. The City U program was special in that I got to work with [00:15:00] graduate students, and so the level of writing was exceptionally high. And I feel like I learned as much from my students as I taught them at the time.

Jane_Houng: I can't resist mentioning at this stage a moment that you describe in your memoir of you having to jet in overnight for one of those semesters, end of semesters events, and you'd actually just been released from prison the night before.

Ravi Shakar: Right, so we're skipping ahead here.

Jane_Houng: I've gone by then, but go on. Do you mind sharing? I mean, you just, it's a very oh, sort of bittersweet moment in your work.

Ravi Shakar: Yeah, absolutely. My memoir correctional is about my bicultural upbringing, but also about these unexpected encounters I had with the criminal justice system, including initially a false [00:16:00] arrest I had in New York. Based on a stop and frisk policy, later deemed unconstitutional, but through which nearly a million innocent New Yorkers, primarily people of color were stopped for any arbitrary reason. And even if you were let go, in my instance there was a warrant for a 5'8 white guy who shared lived at the same address as me. And I was arrested and put into jail at Central Booking. I had to stay there for 72 hours. And when I got out, I got on my soapbox. I wrote an op ed. I was on NPR. I even sued the city. And I won a very modest settlement.

Little did I realize at the time, it would actually prefigure a greater intimacy with the criminal justice system. And so, you're skipping ahead a little bit, but I do believe I may have the dubious distinction of being the first American professor to be promoted while being incarcerated. And the reasons of that are a [00:17:00] little complicated, and you can read about them in Correctional. But I had ended up having to do 90 days after driving on a suspended license after having a DUI, very stupidly. And as a result, I had to do this 90 days the very year I was going up for promotion to full professor in a school in Connecticut. So even while I was teaching at City University of Hong Kong, I also had this teaching job at a state school in the state of Connecticut.

A very puritanical state I should mention. And because I had the good fortune of having a very highly paid attorney, he managed to break up the sentence so that I had to do five separate bids. Which in retrospect, I wish I had done all at once because every time you had to go in and be processed, you had to spread your ass cheeks and lift your balls. Ah put on the prison tans and be transmuted into a carceral object. You'd lose your name. You're given a number. [00:18:00] And this was at in Hartford Correctional that I had to kind of spend this time and indeed that one, first summer, I think it was, oh, nearly a decade ago, 2013. I had to do 45 days. in Hartford Correctional. And as you mentioned the next day and I will say that it was eyeopening in so many ways. It's changed the trajectory of my life. I met men who initially I was terrified by, and by the end of the 45 days I was very close to who shared their stories with me, who I realized had some of the same hopes and dreams and aspirations that I did. And I think my memoir is unique in that I am poised both on the side of exceptional privilege and exceptional discrimination. And so I had a lot more than many of the men that I had met. And yet I was inside for some of the same reasons that they were in part, I think because of the color of my skin. But [00:19:00] that summer after doing these 45 days, you're right.

The next day I got on a plane and I flew to Hong Kong. I hadn't told anyone about that because I was, of course, still deeply ashamed of what had happened. And I got off the plane and I taught my students in Hong Kong. I even had drinks with the ambassador at the top of the Ritz Carlton. A fabulous couple of weeks. And then I got on a plane and returned to Connecticut and had to go back to jail for two weeks. And that year, what a really disconcerting mind altering year it was because I would be teaching, and when the students went off for spring break, I'd have to go back into jail to serve another week.

Until I had completed this 90 day pre trial detention, I had not even been convicted of anything, but in order to satisfy the State. What a nefarious phrase that is. I always think of that. Imagine a evil goddess or a goddess like [00:20:00] Kali who we saw, who needed to be propitiated with human flesh at the very end of these 90 days, and I had gotten my promotion, I had exceeded expectations in terms of teaching, I had excellent evaluations, I had been publishing a lot. And this just needed to get rubber stamped by the Board of Regents who is appointed by the Democratic Governor. Well, right when I was finishing off this 90 day sentence and my promotion was being finalized, somehow, a former Republican Senator got a hold of this information. And all of a sudden It became huge news. I was on the front page of the papers. I was on television. They sent TV crews to my house, where my young daughters were waiting to go to school. And that moment, I think was utterly devastating in, in so many ways. And I would come to realize that in part, it was an election year. This Republican columnist was using [00:21:00] me as a way to take pot shots at the democratic governor.

Certainly it was a sexy, alluditive title. Poet and professor promoted while in prison. And you know, they, as my friends said, they made me out to be a wild animal escaped from the zoo. And Oh, the children. Can you imagine the children that this reprobate professor with a gambling addiction, a drug problem, all of this was invented, of course, but it made for very salacious copy was all over the news. And so it was something that I found exceptionally difficult to deal with. I know. That it was an immense embarrassment to my family. My South Indian family who'd sacrificed so much to have me educated at a university like Columbia. To my young daughters. I lived in a very small, quintessential New England village town where I was half the population of color. I think there was another guy, another black guy, and we'd see each other and [00:22:00] nod on occasion. But a very homogenous, if lovely town. And yeah. All of a sudden, there I am on the front page of the news. And so when I got out, I'd finished these 90 days, I'd kept my promotion, and yet I found that I was re entering a world that was completely changed, that my place in this world had shifted, that friends that I had for years backed away as if I had some kind of cancer of some kind. I found that people wouldn't meet my eyes, meet my gaze as I passed them on the street, and yet as, when I walked by them, I could feel their eyes boring holes into the back of my skull. And it was really a very difficult time. So difficult, in fact, that I ended up checking myself into Butler Hospital because it was probably the closest that I ever felt to feelings of self harm.

Jane_Houng: Ravi, I can't imagine how difficult that must have been.

Ravi Shakar: It was it was an [00:23:00] really awful time and it was me struggling with culpability. I'd certainly made some mistakes and done some stupid things. And yet, as my friend in New York said, if this had happened in New York, no one would care. It was only a misdemeanor offense that I had been accused of. And yet, In a small state like Connecticut.

Jane_Houng: Tabloid. They blew it up.

Ravi Shakar: They blew it up and to such an extent that it became really quite toxic in my department. I think many of my colleagues were really embarrassed by my actions. They felt it. Cast a bad light on the work that they were doing. Even though I had a number of supporters, I think many people believed what they read in the newspaper. This is, I teach journalism now. Huh.

Jane_Houng: Good.

Ravi Shakar: I realized then that journalism, there's not a lot of room for nuance. And once a particular story has been established, that's what they want to run with. And they didn't want to complicate by asking why was I promoted to full professor. [00:24:00] Well because of my

Jane_Houng: Outstanding poetry.

Ravi Shakar: My teaching and poetry and scholarship and research but all of that and nothing I had done affected my teaching or happened at school. I hadn't hurt anyone really except for myself and yet America as many of your listeners might know is really a carceral state. 5 percent of the world's population, 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population, more than China and North Korea and Iran combined. And when you overlay that with the racial demographic of who is being incarcerated, it's primarily people of color. It's Michelle Alexander has this great book called The New Jim Crow where she talks about how the prison industrial complex rose directly out of slavery as a way to continue to curtail the civil liberties of those who are just finally getting their constitutional rights.

Jane_Houng: So you were a poet. This happened, and then [00:25:00] you chose to actually write about it and you've given a TED Talk, too. So, in essence, you saw the inequities of the prison system, the hypocrisies, the paradoxes, and you made some good friends. I mean, now a few years later, when you look back, what particular happening or what particular insights did you gain from going through such a humiliating experience?

Ravi Shakar: Yes, I think the silver lining for me was that what I knew theoretically, I knew about these statistics, I knew that America had this problem with prisons, but until I experienced it firsthand, I didn't really know. And once I was in there, I could not unsee what I'd seen. And in part, I felt I had to write this memoir because I met a number of men who shared stories with me, intimate stories, and they made me promise that I would do something with them. They said, you have a voice. We don't. [00:26:00] No one cares about us. You've seen what it's like in here and what I found was that the system was meant to inflict more trauma that under the guise of quote unquote rehabilitation in fact the conditions were abysmal I'm a college professor and I volunteered to teach at the school and yet they ignored my requests. They would serve breakfast at 5 am. Lunch at 10 am. And dinner at 3 pm. So that by the time the evening hours came around, people were ravenous and if you had money on your books, you could buy this overpriced, totally inedible, artificial food from the prison commissary. And most of the time you spent in your, I wasn't in a cell, I was in a dorm with 60 other guys. You're on these bunk beds and the space that three bunks made together was called your cube. And much of the time you were just sitting around. You [00:27:00] probably got hour a day of time in the rec yard. Rec yard is exaggerating it because it was a patch of concrete surrounded by barbed wire where there was a basketball hoop. And I still remember this, and this is why I feel like some of the traumatic experience was intentional because this basketball court had one hoop on one side that was 12 feet tall and one hoop on the other side that was about eight feet tall, which inevitably meant that when people were playing. There would be arguments that would break out. There would be fights. And then people would have to go into the hole.

Jane_Houng: Punished.

Ravi Shakar: Punished. Really the entire experience showed me that what was happening in jail was a kind of a re traumatization, a dehumanization, and not a preparation for these men to re enter society, which is probably why America has one of the highest recidivism rates. And it's also a place where there are privatized prisons. So when you build these prisons, you need [00:28:00] bodies to fill them up.

Jane_Houng: Yes, we've got the same in the UK now, alas. So what's been some of the outcomes of you publishing the book?

Ravi Shakar: Well, I will say that even writing this book, I had a lot of resistance particularly from my mother, who the South Asian way of dealing with trauma is to dig a deep hole, shove it down there and bury it very deeply and never acknowledge it again. And, but for me, this experience had fundamentally transformed me, had taught me about what prison was really like and, but moreover because I had been so, profusely covered in the local media, I felt like I needed to tell my side of the story. And speak back, speak the truth of this experience. I don't know if the readers of the Hartford Courant ever would have read my memoir. I know that after this time I've lost touch with some people who were really dear. But the [00:29:00] amazing thing was other people who I thought were kind of ancillary in my life. Stepped up in a really big way and were there for me. And you know, I think it took me about six years to write this book, multiple revisions and drafts. I thought initially, and this is how I got through some of this time. I imagined myself as an immersion journalist, parachuted down into this space and I was just observing and I probably filled up. Oh, over a dozen composition books filled with everything from the slang and the jargon that I heard around me to tabulating the different kinds of meals to the list of censored books. There would be passages, Men's Health Magazine, 1982, pages 24 to 32. Banned. Well, what was in there one wonders you know, the different kind of bureaucratic forms that existed. I wrote about how the [00:30:00] many of the people I met had maybe substance abuse issues or mental health issues. They weren't being addressed.

Jane_Houng: They weren't be addressed.

Ravi Shakar: No. In fact, there was really further stigmatization. I mentioned a little bit in my TEDx talk. That when people would have to get their psychiatric medicines, the officer who would come out would yell in this kind of barker voice. Screws and Skittles! Come get your Skittles! And people would have to line up. Often times they were given the wrong dosage, the wrong medication no access to mental health counselor, no job training, no preparation for entering the world. And so it's not any surprise that many of these men I met had been in and out of jail for much of their lives, as had their parents a lot of times. And this is the thing about incarceration. It creates a lasting generational trauma that affects people for a [00:31:00] very long time.

Jane_Houng: But as for your life, you resumed as a poet, as an editor, you got a doctorate in Sydney. So you're an academic. At what stage did you decide that you would like to go back inside in order to teach creative writing?

Ravi Shakar: Yeah, so, when I finished this time and I thankfully I had a union at my university and I probably could have stayed and fought for my job. I sometimes wonder if I made the right decision because in my Benjamin Buttnick existence, I was a tenured full professor. Probably before I deserved it, I had tenure in my 20s but and now I'm a senior lecturer at Tufts. So it's almost like I'm moving backwards and in another 10 years I might become a graduate student again. And then maybe I'll be in diapers, who knows? But I did, as you mentioned, I got this wonderful opportunity, an international research fellowship. To get a Ph. [00:32:00] D. and to finish working on my book at the University of Sydney. And so I was able to move out there. And I think the distance, being in Australia, looking back at Connecticut, it put it into perspective. And it made me realize how minute this place is. How large the world is. And that I really wanted to share my story. But more than that so many of the men I met were really intelligent and empathetic and resourceful. And it made me wonder if they were given the proper kinds of training and assistance, I believe they could contribute immensely to society. Incarceration costs the Americans billions of dollars, and yet the overall net effect is 30 odd percent recidivism rate. People with sustained trauma, I believe many people come out of jails and prisons more disassociated and potentially more dangerous than when they went in. [00:33:00] And I think that is intentional. And so I felt that I wanted to do something. I wanted to go back inside and criminal justice reform was, has been and still is a big part of my life, but I also wanted to provide because I'm a big believer in bibliotherapy. And for me, writing this book helped me take control of my own trauma and tell my own story. And I think for many people, what they've been told, certainly when they're on the inside, is that they're terrible people that they have no future or no prospects, they're looked down on by society. And when given the tools to be able to articulate their ideas, to embrace their trauma it actually helps them go forward and so I started teaching and I've been teaching at Tufts University for the last four years and they have a wonderful program. Massachusetts is one of the more progressive states in the U. S. [00:34:00] and they have a program where they bring college accredited classes inside and I decided that this was something that I really wanted to do and so I've been, for the last four years teaching everything from creative nonfiction, to journalism, to poetry at everywhere from the minimum security facility to last semester I was at the maximum security facility with a number of people serving life sentences. I have been struck by how sharp many of my students are. And I will just mention.

Jane_Houng: Yes, please. Give us a specific example. I mean, you know, the difference between teaching the typical undergraduate and inmates.

Ravi Shakar: Yes, exactly. The example I was thinking of was that one semester I had to teach creative non fiction at Tufts and I was teaching memoir writing at a facility in Massachusetts. And so there was some crossover on the curriculum. We read some of the same books. And what was [00:35:00] so interesting to me was how different the discussion was. We would read Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, and there was a way in which my tough students were really bright, kind and they are aware of their privilege. And yet there was a way in which none of them wanted to disagree with one another. There was a certain politically correct line that they would all walk. The discussions were much more demure, whereas on the inside there were boisterous arguments. People were wanted to respectfully disagree with each other about, oh, should the Irish like Frank McCord or not? Did he stereotype them? What are the connections between the Irish and African Americans and immigration? And there was a certain kind of vitality to those conversations that, in many respects, outstripped the very kind of tame and predictable conversations that were happening inside of the classroom.

Jane_Houng: Ravi, I see your life as a particularly colorful one but one [00:36:00] of redemption. That's what it's all about, isn't it? Through misfortunes, for whatever reason, you do stuff, you do things for the sake of common manner. I'm absolutely delighted that I've had this time to talk to you and for me to understand more about you. So, thank you so very much for your time.

Ravi Shakar: It's been my pleasure, Jane. Thank you so much.

Jane_Houng: Thanks again for listening to Mending Lives with me, Jane Hong. It was produced by Brian Ho. You can find relevant links to this show in the comments section. I would not, could not, be doing this without many people's support and encouragement. So until next time, [00:37:00] goodbye.