Sonny Garg - When Your Dream Is My Nightmare

 

So, it's 1983. I live in Maumee, Ohio, it's a suburb of Toledo. I'm 16 years old and I'm entering senior year of high school. I've got two things on my mind. The first is girls. Unfortunately, when I entered high school, I was 4'8", weighed about 80 pounds. [audience chuckle] And by the time I got to senior year, I still made Urkel from Family Matters, look like a Playgirl centerfold. So, that was off the table. The second thing I was worried about, being a good Indian boy, was colleges. And on that front, my dad had me covered. 

 

My dad had grown up very poor in India, eight siblings in a small three-room apartment. They would pull down their bedding every night and they would roll it out, sleep on it. And in the morning, roll it back up and send it back up. So, regardless of how many Merchant Ivory movies you've seen, growing up being colonized is not as charming and witty [audience chuckle] as a Hugh Grant movie. But he had a dream. His dream was to come to America, and to study and to go to Harvard. And so, he did. He came here in 1961 with that proverbial one suitcase, a couple bucks in his pocket and he ended up getting a PhD. He did not go to Harvard, however. 

 

So, like any good parent, he quickly determined that the best thing he could do for his children was to take his dream and make that his children's nightmare. [audience laughter] And so, he raised all my older sisters, three older sisters, and myself with the intention of all of us going to Harvard.

 

My eldest sister came home her senior year. She'd come to America when she was eight years old, hardly knew any English. My dad threw her in school and said, “Good luck.” She came home 10 years later and she said to my dad, "Dad, I finished second in my class." My dad looked at her and said, "Who finished first?" [audience aww] She went to Oberlin. [audience laughter] My next sister came home and she said, "Dad, I'm editor of the yearbook, I'm captain of the cheerleaders and I'm valedictorian." And my dad said, "The standards have gone to hell." She went to Northwestern. [audience chuckle] My next sister came home and said, "Dad, I got into MIT." And my dad said, "Yeah, it's not Harvard." So, he's left with me, the last kid. And to hedge his bets, he enrolls me in an all-boys Jesuit prep school.

 

You can imagine going as the Hindu kid. I might as well have shown up with the Ganesh lunchbox or something. [audience laughter] And so, if my dad's entire life was rebelling against the world's low expectations of him, I made it mine to rebel against his high expectations of me. And so, rather than focus on college, I had the brilliant idea, as I entered senior year, to write an underground newspaper with some friends. So, we got all together and we wrote these. It was like four pages, maybe a graph front and back. It was called The Other Side. It was all about everything wrong with the school, everything possibly wrong with the school, with a little review of all the parties and how there wasn't enough free alcohol, even though we're all like 16.

 

But probably, then we had a little coupon you could clip out and it was-- If you drove to school and it said, "Thanks for parking so blanking close, next time leave a can opener so I can get out." But probably the one area, the one column, that got us eventually in the most trouble was called Isn't it ironic that our health teacher smokes? Isn't it ironic that our communication teacher communicates by throwing chairs? [audience chuckle] The one that got us in the most trouble eventually was, Isn't it ironic that we have a celibate priest teaching us about sexual relationships? [audience laughter] So, needless to say, we broke into school at night, we put them in the lockers, then we came in the next morning, we're waiting to see what happens. They basically tried to kick us all out of school. They desperately wanted us all out.

 

Fortunately, the parents were able to keep us in school, but they stripped us of all our leadership positions, took away National Honor Society, all that stuff that seems to matter at that age. And then, I submit all my applications to college and I get this note from one of the people who's recommending me or supposed to be recommending me. And he said, "I found it really hard to recommend you to college." I thought to myself, then why did you do that? [chuckles] [audience laughter] 

 

So, the day shows up, you're starting to get all the letters open. No surprise, I did not get into Harvard. However, as I opened up all the other letters, I realized I got into no colleges. Zero. None. So, not only did I not get into Harvard, I got into no colleges. I thought my dad was going to go ballistic. Instead, he supported me, and he stayed with me, and he continued and he helped me find a way to get into a college. 

 

Fast forward ten years after I was rejected, I'm standing outside of a building with all my classmates in a master's program in public policy. I'm leading them into Harvard Yard for a degree at Harvard. I'm looking over at my dad. He rarely smiles, but it's really warm and nice when he does. And then, at the end of the night, after we had some dinner and we had some celebratory moments, he came up to me, and he came up and he put his hands behind his back like he's want to do. I was waiting for this beautiful moment, and he looked at me and he said, "Now, you must write a book." [audience laughter]