The Way We Are
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After graduating, I headed off to West Point, where I joined fellow graduate Dave Skinrood as new cadets facing plebe year. After less than a year, however, West Point and I came to a gentleman’s agreement that the Army and I were not suited to one another, and I eventually graduated from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In my senior year, I passed the foreign service exam and in 1971 headed off to India as a member of the now-extinct U.S. Information Agency, where my life changed forever. I met my wife of 37 years, Ila Jasani, in Calcutta, was married in that city, and started a peripatetic life that lasted 34 years, including a total of eight years in India, and sixteen years in the Middle East, moving from Calcutta on the Bay of Bengal to Tel Aviv on the Mediterranean, passing through New Delhi, Bombay, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Amman, and Jerusalem on the way. Ila and I were joined over the years by our two daughters, Mallika and Maya, who are now 31 and 28, respectively, with Mallika having married in 2008, bringing her husband Mike into our family.
After retiring from government in 2004, I spent five years representing the Indian multinational company Tata Sons in the U.S. At present, I’ve stepped back from full-time work and consult part-time as a senior director at Madeleine Albright’s business advisory firm, Albright Stonebridge Group.
Forty-five years on from Yorktown, I find myself back in Northern Virginia, not that far from Yorktown. Ila and I spend a lot of time in India (she’ll unfortunately be there at the time of the reunion), and I am finally able to devote proper attention to my personal interests of Indian art and American history collections. Mallika and Mike live in Salt Lake City, but Maya works locally as a pre-school teacher and lives in Ballston. I’m fortunate that my 93-year old father still lives nearby as well.
Current Photos:
David, Mallika, Ila and Maya on the day of Mallika’s marriage
shows our whole family – David, Ila, Maya, Mallika, my father, and Mallika’s husband Mike – at Maya’s college graduation
