media matters
Bonds of Loyalty and Love Powerful family stories lead to a desire to trace the past “The underlying narrative of Bonds of Destiny is timeless and reflects a universal truth integral to human consciousness — the need to bond and the desire to connect with people,” says author Rajesh Varma MBA ’86 (pictured kneeling above).
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miamian magazine
Like children everywhere, Rajesh Varma MBA ’86 loved
listening to bedtime stories when he was young, especially since his father, Bhushan, skipped the fairy tales and instead regaled his son with an ongoing narrative. These were his father’s true adventures as an officer in the British Army of colonial India during World War II. Always nearby was his loyal orderly, Shingara Singh, who in defending Bhushan’s honor, was sentenced to death for a crime he didn’t commit. Rajesh came to the U.S. in 1984 to attend Miami. He went on to work for PricewaterhouseCoopers, PepsiCo, Disney, and Nestlé. Well into his adulthood, long after he’d left his childhood home of Batala in the northwestern Indian state of Punjab, he felt haunted by his father’s stories. He began to write them down in a spiral notebook. “By the time I started putting together Bonds of
Destiny in the early 1990s, it was too late for me to go back to my father and ask for more details, to beg him to share with me just one more story.” In his search for answers as to what happened to the orderly and his family, Rajesh had enough details to follow a trail to the orderly’s family in the village of Ghasitpura. As everyone grew closer, Singh’s family completed the story that Rajesh’s father had started decades before. Years after his first visit, Rajesh returned to India with his own son and daughter, Abhinav and Meera, to get to know Singh’s family and hear their stories. “The bond of destiny has been ceremoniously passed over to the next generation, just as my father had passed it on to me,” he said. Rajesh lives in Burbank, California, with his wife, Arti, an elementary school teacher.
