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My father originally came to the United States around the age of six with the rest of his family in connection with my granfather's posting at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. Over the next 12 years the family lived between both the United States and India, with my father finally coming to settle in the States once he began college.  When my father was in the middle of his graduate work at the University of Michigan, he married my mother, who had finished up her undergraduate studies in Nepal, and they both eventually came to reside eventually in Schenectady, New York, where I was born and raised.

My sister and I had a very interesting and rich cross section of cultures surrounding us through our childhood, mainly the result of the very diverse and international crowd my father worked with at the General Electric Research Laboratories in Schenectady. The small community we lived in was filled with families literally from all over the globe – China, India, Nigeria, the UK, Netherlands, Germany, to name just a few – and with that came an incredible diversity of cultures, language, food and traditions. It was a wonderful place to grow and learn, to be exposed to so many different points of view and attitudes which helped shape me.  II believe such diversity is equally important in the modern workplace and certainly at a firm like Ropes & Gray.

After completing my undergraduate and masters degrees in electrical engineering from Cornell University, I worked for five years as a microprocessor designer at both Motorola Corporation in Austin, Texas, and then at HaL Computer Systems (a start-up in Silicon Valley that eventually was acquired by Fujitsu Corporation in the early 1990s). After the acquisition of HaL by Fujitsu, I made the decision to leave engineering behind me, travel cross-country and attend Columbia University School of Law, where I received my J.D. in 1998.

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