Leadership and Crisis (6 page)

They moved into student housing and quickly discovered what most Americans know: health insurance can be expensive and frustrating. They were informed that their insurance plan would not cover my mother’s pregnancy. In short, I came into this world as a “pre-existing condition.” In healthcare, like every other facet of life, it was important for my dad to be self-reliant; he would never ask anyone for charity or help. So he went to the doctor shortly before my birth and
set up an installment plan to pay the bill. When he explained to me later how he paid for my birth, I asked him, “What would have happened if you had missed a payment on me? Would they repossess?”

“Trust me,” he said dryly. “If that was an option, we would have skipped a payment.”

My father had grown up around extreme poverty; he’d witnessed people starving to death and dying from easily curable illnesses. He didn’t take healthcare or housing or even food for granted. He lived frugally, and I remember he once told me and my younger brother Nikesh, “If there is only enough food for some of us, we’ll always feed you first.” As a kid in middle-class America, with plenty all around, this seemed a bizarre thing to say.

For my dad, it was all about survival. While we were never poor growing up, we were taught to make the most of every dollar. When I was small, I would stuff change into my piggy bank. To my father this made no sense. “The money should go into the bank and earn interest,” he would say. Dad was always practical.

When I was four, I announced to my preschool class and anyone who would listen that my new name was “Bobby” (which I took from my favorite character on
The Brady Bunch
). My parents were puzzled. They’d already given me a name, Piyush, but Bobby stuck, and it’s a testament to my parents that they never felt the nickname was somehow a rejection of our heritage. In fact, they began calling me “Bobby,” too.

Nicknames are pretty common here in Louisiana. You give people nicknames and they become comfortable and familiar, like an old pair of jeans. But you have to be careful that nicknames don’t take on a life of their own. We call one of our sons Boudreaux because when he was an infant we applied a lot of “Boudreaux’s Butt Paste” to you-know-where.
(It’s a Louisiana thing, you might not understand.) But do we really want him having to explain how he earned the name? I don’t think so.

My parents managed to walk the tightrope that many immigrants face: teaching their kids about their ancestral home while embracing all that is America. While some immigrant families have kept one foot firmly planted in the “home country,” my parents always raised us from the earliest days to think of ourselves not as hyphenated Americans, but simply as Americans. I don’t recall them ever referring to India as “home.” Louisiana was home. I remember seeing other immigrant families where the kids spent almost all their free time with people of the same background. But my parents were always going to crawfish boils and cookouts.

One of the rites of passage for kids in Baton Rouge was attending summer camp. Mom and Dad sent us to every one imaginable, partly just to get us out of the house. They were confident enough in their Hindu identity to send us to camps organized by local churches. One summer my mom enrolled me in Camp Reznikoff, a Jewish summer camp. Being the only tan-skinned gentile in the group, I decided to throw my hat in the ring when it came time to elect a group president. I picked the prettiest counselor as my campaign manager and offered free candy to anyone who would vote for me. The strategy worked and I won. (Some say I learned the essentials of Louisiana politics early.) It never would have occurred to me that I might be rejected because I was a little different from the other kids. My parents didn’t raise me to think that way.

I generally avoided trouble as a kid, but like all kids, I had my moments. In high school, growing up in a college town, there was always the allure of heading off with the college crowd. But the biggest pull was New Orleans, the big city with the big reputation only one
hour down the highway. We knew it was the ultimate party town and sometimes we’d take off with friends for a Saturday trip. One mom tried to scare us. “Now don’t get into trouble boys, because in New Orleans they don’t put you
in
the jail—they put you
under
it.” That only made it all the more exciting, walking down Bourbon Street in the French Quarter and sneaking into clubs to listen to great music. It was all pretty harmless fun. Some people might not think of New Orleans as wholesome, but I have to say, I enjoyed it—and I never got arrested, never experimented with drugs, and generally lived a life that was like
Leave It to Beaver
with a Louisiana twist.

My brother and I held summer jobs as soon as we were old enough. To raise money for school activities I sold concessions at the LSU Tiger football games. We’d get to the stadium early and be there until midnight cleaning up. I can’t say it was the most fun I ever had, but it was, as they say, a learning experience—especially about the ingenious ways people can sneak alcohol into a sporting event.

From my mom and dad, I learned that hard work is a virtue—it was one they practiced every day—and so was achievement. One of my father’s worst insults was to say that someone “had great potential.” It meant you weren’t working hard enough. If you brought home a 95 on a test, he wanted to know why it wasn’t a 100. Some subjects came easily to me and my brother, but we quickly learned that my dad wasn’t impressed if we only had to study for an hour to ace a test. Hard work had value in itself, and I discovered from him that the harder you work at something the easier it becomes.

One thing I worked on unbeknownst to my parents—at least initially—was faith. It came fully into the open in shocking circumstances:
I was lying in a hospital bed after I totaled my dad’s Toyota Corolla, which I had borrowed.

My head had crashed through the driver’s side window, but at the time I was more worried about the damage to the car than to my health. I had argued with my parents to get a driver’s license at a young age, and now dad’s new car was totaled. I had pestered the ambulance driver and emergency room doctor for a damage report on the car; I wanted to repair the damage before my dad saw it.

Naturally, my parents couldn’t have cared less about the car’s condition. They were concerned about me. They had visited the accident scene on the way to the hospital, seen the blood, and feared the worst. Now, after the initial shock of the accident had worn off, my mom stood by the bed and asked me a question that put me in a painful spot: “Which God do you have to thank for your safety, Bobby?”

Growing up I was taught to pray and believe in an all-powerful God who created the universe and was present and active in our daily lives. My parents were, and remain to this day, devout Hindus. There was no Hindu temple in Baton Rouge at the time, but we had a prayer altar in our home. My younger brother Nikesh and I would say our prayers there every night—it didn’t matter how tired we were. We prayed, as kids are apt to, “Dear God, if you will just give me an A in history, I’ll be good to my little brother,” or, “If you will just give me one more toy, I won’t ask you for anything else.” To us, God was like Santa Claus. I believed in and respected God, but prayer was a transaction—“I’ll be good and you’ll give me what I want.”

But the values I learned from my Hindu parents ran deep: honesty, respect for elders, hard work, modesty, reverence, the importance of family—traditional Hindu values that meshed quite well with
Louisiana’s traditional Bible Belt beliefs. I never felt culturally different from your typical Baton Rouge kid.

My parents naturally assumed I would remain a Hindu and pass the faith on to the next generation. By the time of the accident, however, my mom and dad knew I was investigating Christianity. And now, here I was, a dutiful son, about to offer an answer that would cause considerable pain to my family.

The path that brought me to that point spiritually was unique in many ways. One day, riding the bus to middle school, my best friend Kent sat down next to me. Kent was the kind of kid who got picked first for baseball and football. And in addition to being a great athlete, he was a cool guy. Everyone wanted to be his best friend, but he was
my
best friend. On this particular day he said something that struck me as very odd.

“Bobby,” he said, “I sure do feel sorry for you.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. He could see my confusion, so he continued. “I feel sorry for you because when my family and I go to heaven, I’m going to miss you when you’re not there.” Billy Graham he was not.

I was a pre-teen at the time, and I thought he was crazy. Who would ever say such an odd thing? I quickly changed the subject, but the conversation jolted me for a few days. Then I forgot about it, until Christmas.

In addition to his other fine qualities, Kent was one of those thoughtful, generous people who bought the best gifts for his friends. So when it was time to open his Christmas present, I ripped off the paper in great anticipation. My heart quickly sank when I opened the box and found a book inside.

“This can’t be the real gift,” I thought. I actually remember flipping through the pages to see if there was any money inside, and being utterly disappointed that there was none. The more I studied the “gift,” the more my disappointment grew. It was not even an interesting book; it was a Bible. The practicality I inherited from my dad kicked in:
Who spends good money buying somebody a Bible?
And,
Why buy a Bible when you can get one free in any hotel room?
Sure, you might get in trouble for stealing towels. But the Bible? No way.

I was even more disappointed when I noticed that on the front cover in gold letters were the words: “Bobby Jindal.” “Great!” I thought. “I can’t even return it or give it to somebody else.”

My journey to Christianity accelerated at the end of my sophomore year in high school when my grandfather died suddenly of a stroke. I had spent happy days visiting him in India, riding on his shoulders as a young boy, and even though he never came to America, he was a big figure in my life. His death marked the first time I had lost somebody I loved. I felt so cheated that I did not get a chance to say good-bye or tell him that I loved him. I was mad that I had wasted so much time while he was still alive, and worried if I would ever see him again. His death also set my mind racing about the biggest questions in our lives: Why are we here? Do our lives have a purpose? Does some part of us live on after death?

The idea of God as Santa Claus no longer satisfied me. Looking for answers, I read Hindu texts and talked to pastors of several different faiths. I pushed my parents to buy a copy of the
Bhagavad Gita
, one of the most important Hindu scriptures, and read all 700 verses. Then I dug out from my closet the unread Bible Kent had given me. I didn’t know how my parents would react to my reading the Bible, so I found a cozy spot in the back of the closet and, armed with a flashlight, I read
from Genesis through to the end. At one point, I bought
Cliff’s Notes to the Bible
, to help me make sense of it. I spent countless hours sitting in that closet, but in the end I had no epiphany. I prayed desperately, promising God that if He told me He existed and how to worship Him, I would consider myself blessed beyond belief and would not ask for anything else.

God used what was most important to me to get my attention back on Him. I was a normal teenage boy, so he used a teenage high school girl to get my attention.

During my junior year in high school, while attending a math tournament in New Orleans (stop snickering), I spotted Kathy. I had a crush on her, but had never mustered the nerve to say hello. This time I did, and we ended up going to a dance and having a great time. That night we stood on the top floor of the Hyatt Hotel in New Orleans and tossed coins down into the water fountain. Things were going great. Here was this pretty girl and she was interested in me! Then I asked her a simple question that changed everything.

“What do you want to do after school?”

Now, most of my friends in Baton Rouge wanted to be doctors, or football players, or teachers, or nurses; a few might have wanted to be rock stars. But she gave me an answer I had never heard. “I want to become a Supreme Court Justice,” she said, “because I want to save innocent lives.”

Where’d this come from?
I thought to myself. And yet, I was struck by her answer. Saving the unborn gave her a purpose in life, something that was missing from mine.

Kathy was Catholic, and out of curiosity I attended Catholic Mass with her. I didn’t want my parents to know, so I was probably the only teenager in Baton Rouge who told his parents he was going to a party
so he could sneak off to church. Here too, as with my first tussle with the Bible, I had no profound spiritual awakening. If anything, I was confused by the kneeling, standing, praying, and mumbled words of the priest over the altar.