Few years ago I published my autobiography exclusively for my children, nephew and nieces. It’s kinda hard to fit it here in a group. I’ll try to summarize the best I can, at the risk of being misunderstood as bragging about myself.
Immigrants are so Blessed. There are three types of Americans; those who were born here, I consider them being here by chance, then there were those who were brought here by force, sadly they were slaves, the third category is those who came here by choice, the immigrants, the lucky ones. Fortunately I belong to the third type.
After being born, raised and living comfortably back in Hyderabad, I decided to migrate for, “higher studies”, for some reason that was an acceptable term, or shall we say an excuse to migrate. At least for me it was funny because after completing my undergraduate education at the Osmani University, I had an Industrial Engineering degree from Delhi Institute of Management, which is higher studies already. But we still called it higher studies, a reason to migrate to America. So that’s exactly what I did, I applied for higher studies to do my MBA in USA. That was back in 1974.
Arrived at O’Hare, picked up by Fawzia and Naseer Bhai. Faiz Ansari was 2 years old. After spending the night at their house I was summoned by Rauf Bhai to come over to his house at Bolingbrook. The Bolingbrook house was only two years old. If I remember it correctly, the house was built in 1972. Ali was 6 years old. Probably Yasmin was 3.
After spending the night there, I was dropped at Joliet where I rented an apartment close to Lewis University where I was enrolled for my higher studies, MBA.
Nasreen Apa gave me a quick 101 cooking class. I learnt to cook Kheema, Daal and Spinich curry.
Razia and I got married in 1977, thanks to my cousin Fawzia who initiated our “Rishta”, we then got married on 9/10/1977. My student status was upgraded as immigrant, thanks to my wife Razia who migrated to USA in 1975, and sponsored me. She migrated just a year after I migrated here.
After some very hard times initially struggling between my college, and part time job to pay for my tuition we started to get settled.
Razia was working at Blue Cross & Blue Shield at the time.
After graduating MBA majoring in Marketing, since there was no such thing as Computer or IT major, it felt like a dead end. I didn’t like Marketing. Marketing major was, to be honest, just to set foot in the country I wanted to adopt.
Back in Hyderabad I had experience flying single engine planes, and having a ppl, (private pilots license) I even tried to get commercial flying training at Lewis University Flying Club. The fees was $100/hour which was way beyond my budget. So that dream collapsed before it was even realized.
My aptitude was really towards technology. I was fortunate enough to find a night job aka graveyard shift operating the monster NCR computer, the size of a large truck. I am exaggerating a little bit maybe, but these computers were a real huge objects. 10k drives were called drums, because they did look like drums. I was soon promoted as software engineer to write codes in Fortran and COBOL for a major hospital billing system. To be honest I hated programming. My inclination was more towards hardware.
Soon after completing several hardware related courses like Cisco, IBM and Microsoft I started working as network engineer.
I was very much a part of the technological evolution. I was fortunate enough to manage a team of engineers during my employment at Lucent Technologies and later at Verizon Wireless Communications. We were dispatched globally to implement the WiFi technology. Before that, most generation-z folks may not realize that we used modems to use internet. Other family members were warned not to use the phone while I was on network.
Our team introduced the WiFi technology in 2001. Soon afterwards everything “wired”, was ancient history.
Our team at Lucent along with Sprint and Verizon successfully tested and deployed WiFi globally.
I bought my first home computer in 1982 probably one of the first ones to own a computer. It was a Radio Shack TRS-80 with floppy disks, no hard drive yet. Much later IBM decided to come up with their own home computer in late ‘80s.
Most of us take technology for granted. Not too long ago all these hi-tech gadgets were unheard of.
Around 1987 I received a 5” floppy in the mail. Prodigy, Sears and IBM were testing network capabilities as a joint venture by sending these disks to random people they thought were working in the field of technology. While testing, I sent my first email to a friend, called him and asked if he got my email. His positive response excited both of us. We actually communicated with each other using a computer, wow. This disk also had a feature to buy airline tickets using your computer.
It was called SABRE. After we tested, SABRE was later commercialized in the early ‘90s. Soon it was obsolete due to other more sophisticated and faster systems.
Technology is amazing as long as we use it responsibly.
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Nasreen Apa’s love for Hyderabad reminded me of the similar love for Hyderabad by my father Hasanuddin Ahmed, whom we all called Agha. He was in Europe on official government deputation in 1947. He had just married my mother on May 1st, 1947. My mother was pregnant with my brother Uno Bhai (Shamsuddin Ahmed). Within few months in Europe the British declared India’s independence on August 15th 1947.
My parents had an option to either stay in England, go to USA or return to the independent India. The choice was difficult for the newly weds with my mother being pregnant and staying back in strange country UK, or migrating to USA and start all over again, or returning to India meant possible discrimination towards Muslims and hardship for my father’s job, who was an HCS (Hyderabad Civil Services) officer. Many Hyderabadis who were in Europe for either higher education or on official business preferred to either stay back in England permanently or migrate to USA.
My parents chose to return to Hyderabad. It was a very difficult but right decision. Although my parents would have been very successful in USA if they decided to migrate to USA in 1947, but returning to Hyderabad gave them the peace of mind. Fortunately, he was transitioned to IAS (Indian Administrative Service), and lived in Hyderabad until he passed away on August 13th, 2019 at the age of 96.5 years. He lived to be the oldest Aziz Bagh family member, close second was my phuppu Zahra Aunty who passed away at the age of 96.
I will post a brief biography of Agha shortly, and encourage all Aziz Bagh family members to contribute a few lines about your own parents or grandparents. Our future generations would love to hear about our extended family.