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Dr. Kumar Bahuleyan, an 81-year-old retired neurosurgeon who lived and worked in Buffalo, N.Y., began life as an untouchable in a poor village in Southern India. In recent years, Bahuleyan has returned to his town to invest his personal fortune in charitable projects there, including a hospital. Bahuleyan talks with Melissa Block.
 

 Buffalo neurosurgeon donates $20 million to his native Indian village
 

Dr. Kumar Bahuleyan went from extreme poverty to lavish living, only to find joy after donating his fortune to his village in India
http://www.buffalonews.com/home/story/130068.html

 

DR. KUMAR BAHULEYAN: ” I’m in a state of nirvana … I have nothing else to achieve in life.”
 

Buffalo neurosurgeon donates $20 million to his native Indian village
 
By Gene Warner NEWS STAFF REPORTER
Updated: 07/30/07 7:26 AM

 

Dr. Kumar Bahuleyan, seen here in India, helped create the East India Seven Seas Sailing Co., which plans to bring WNY volunteers to India through the “Sailors Who Heal” program.
 

He was born into the “untouchable” caste in India, so poor that he didn’t wear his first pair of shoes until he went to medical school.

 

Then he came to America, where he made millions as a Buffalo neurosurgeon and lived a lavish life, once owning a Rolls-Royce, five Mercedes-Benzes and an airplane.

 

But he felt empty, almost soulless. So he donated his personal fortune — some $20 million — to establish a neurosurgery hospital, a health clinic and a spa resort in his native Indian village, Chemmanakary.

 

Now, at 81, Dr. Kumar Bahuleyan has come full circle: from dire poverty in India, to the lifestyles of the rich in America and back to his native village, where he’s traded his Mercedes for a bicycle.

 

“I was born with nothing; I was educated by the people of that village, and this is what I owe to them,” Bahuleyan said recently in Buffalo.

 

“I’m in a state of nirvana, eternal nirvana,” he said. “I have nothing else to achieve in life. This was my goal, to help my people. I can die any time, as a happy man.”

 

The Bahuleyan story seems almost too good to be true, a rags-toriches story that has taken him back to his impoverished roots.

 

Another Indian native, Dr. Pearay Ogra, the former chief of infectious diseases at Women & Children’s Hospital and the president of the Bahuleyan Charitable Foundation, said he believes he understands why Bahuleyan donated his fortune.

 

“He grew up in a traditional Hindu culture, with a deep sense of universal giving,” Ogra said.

 

“If you can afford it, give it back to the people who brought you up.”

 

Others are moved by Bahuleyan’s infectious spirit and energy.

 

One is Bill Zimmermann, executive director of a Buffalo sailing school who is helping Bahuleyan set up a sailing and boatbuilding school in Chemmanakary. The venture is designed to teach sailing and boatbuilding skills to the Indian villagers, provide more jobs and use its profits to help fund medical treatment for the villagers.

 

Once Bahuleyan got hooked on the concept, he started spending 50 hours a week at Zimmerman’s Seven Seas Sailing School, located on the Buffalo ship canal, trying to learn about his latest venture.

 

“He’s not mesmerizing or evangelical, but he seems like a living saint,” Zimmermann said.

 

“He does nothing but imbue a sense of calm and decency. He brings out the best in you.”

Bahuleyan has never told his full story before in Buffalo, where he has lived since 1973.

Miserable conditions
 

One reason may be the kind of reaction he got when a young woman, after hearing about all his charitable works in India, approached him at Seven Seas a few weeks ago. If he made his fortune in Western New York, she asked, why didn’t he donate primarily to the many needy charities here?

 

Buffalo and Western New York, he replied, don’t need his help as badly as those in his native village, where he knew firsthand the extreme misery and poverty. That feeling fueled his passionate desire to give back to that village.

 

About 20 to 25 years ago, when he was earning a fortune as a neurosurgeon, Bahuleyan returned to Chemmanakary and was struck by how little it had changed.

 

“This village remained absolutely the same — not a road, no school, no water supply, no sanitary facilities,” he said. “I looked in the [people’s] faces and saw the same people living in the same miserable conditions I had grown up with.” Ogra put it another way.

 

“For the kind of poverty he’s dealing with in southern India, there is no other outlet for support,” he said.

 

It’s impossible to understand Bahuleyan without learning more about those “miserable conditions” he came from— including the cries of anguish from his dying brothers and sister in the 1930s. Two younger brothers and a sister, all under 8 years old, died of roundworm infestation after drinking polluted water, he said.

 

“I was the oldest, feeling very helpless, listening to the screams of these dying children, one by one,” he said. “Their cries stuck in my psyche. Even now it haunts me.”

Bahuleyan suffered from smallpox and typhoid fever..

 

“The good Lord saved me for a purpose,” he said. “I believe that, even today.”

 

As an “untouchable,” Bahuleyan had to take a roundabout route to school because he wasn’t allowed to pass within a few hundred yards of the Hindu temple, even though he was born a Hindu.

 

Bahuleyan never saw ice cream until he was in medical college in his early 20s. And he remembers buying his first pair of shoes as a young adult; he put the right shoe on his left foot and realized it didn’t fit.

 

Excessive spending
Bahuleyan had attended a lower-caste school and reached the top level at age 12 or 13. Only a chance encounter between his father and the headmaster of a Brahmin-run, English- speaking school got him into that school, where he never paid a penny.

 

A star student, he went to high school, then a premedical school run by Christian missionaries before attending medical college in Madras, now called Chennai.

 

The local government in Kerala sent him to the United Kingdom for neurosurgical training at a college in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he spent six years before returning home. But he couldn’t land a job in his specialty.

 

“They didn’t know what to do with me,” he said. “There was no position available for a neurosurgeon. Many people didn’t know what neurosurgery was.”

 

So Bahuleyan went to Kingston, Ont., then Albany Medical College, before coming to Buffalo in 1973 to work with neurosurgeon Dr. John Zoll. During his 26-year career,

 

Bahuleyan was in private practice, with offices on Linwood and Kenmore avenues and Main Street. He also served as a clinical associate professor in neurosurgery at the University at Buffalo before retiring in 1999. And he made millions.

 

“I didn’t ask for the money,” he said. “The money came to me. My secretary said to me, ‘Dr.

 

Bahuleyan, you’re making too much money.’ I had never had any money. So I went berserk with money.”

 

Bahuleyan also earned a reputation as a shrewd investor, both here and in India.

 

But his most outrageous moment may have come one day in the 1980s, when he walked into the Mercedes-Benz dealer – ship and eyed a 500SL.

 

He asked the salesman how much the car cost.

 

The sticker price was $115,000, he was told.

 

“Here is my credit card,” Bahuleyan replied.

 

Bahuleyan talks about his spending sprees as if he were talking about someone else.

 

“I compare it to a kid who gets a toy, plays with it, throws it away and gets another toy,” he said. “I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t care. It was the hedonistic phase of my life.”

 

It slowly dawned on Bahuleyan, especially after he went back to India, that he was getting no joy from his lifestyle.

 

“I woke up in the morning feeling terrible,” he said. “I kept asking myself, ‘What am I doing?’ ”

So in 1989, he set up the Bahuleyan Charitable Foundation, which built a small clinic in Indai for young children and pregnant women in 1993, while also installing latrines, roads and a water supply for the villagers. Bahuleyan’s foundation built the Indo-American Hospital Brain and Spine Centre in 1996, starting with 80 beds.

 

None of the facilities carries his name.

 

“They wanted to glorify me and put the hospital and a road in my name,” he said. “I said ‘No.’ The whole idea was one of selfless service.”

 

His grandiose plans were flawed, though. His emotions had fueled all his efforts, stopping him from making a realistic plan that would be financially viable. He needed a profitable venture to fund his efforts.

 

In 2004, the foundation opened the Kalathil Health Resorts, offering luxury rooms, health spas and exercise rooms, and catering to India’s burgeoning middle class.

 

Bahuleyan’s next brainstorm brought him back to Buffalo, where he came up with the idea for the new East India Seven Seas Sailing Co.

 

Early this summer, Bahuleyan went to the Seven Seas Sailing School, where he had learned to sail 26 years earlier. Within days, Seven Seas officials were thrilled with his plan for setting up the sailing school in the southwestern corner of India near the Arabian Sea.

 

Four sailboats, all 22- to 26- footers, are being shipped to India next month, and at least three Western New Yorkers are heading there this fall to help set up the school.

 

The long-range plan calls for the new East India Seven Seas Sailing Co. to accept applications from Western New York couples willing to spend a few weeks in India, to volunteer in Bahuleyan’s hospital and to teach sailing, as part of the “Sailors Who Heal” program.

 

“You don’t see India’s recreational tourism ports dotted with sailboats,” Zimmermann said. “We’re going to change that, with our Sailors Who Heal program from Buffalo.”

 

The sailing school, to be run in conjunction with the health resort, will open with a zero-interest loan from the foundation. Eventually, school officials expect their profits will pay off the loan, with future profits going to the hospital.

 

“If I charge more [for the health services] to the poor people, they will go without the services, or they will have to sell their own house,” Bahuleyan said. “But I can charge any amount of money the market will bear for a luxurious health resort and to teach them sailing and boatbuilding.”

 

Bahuleyan, who lives in Buffalo with his wife, pathologist Dr. Indira Kartha, now spends half the year here, the other half in India. In his native land, he oversees his foundation’s work, gets around on a bicycle and still does almost daily surgery.

 

“My dream is to see this all running without my help, so I can pass away peacefully, knowing that I created something and gave something back,” he said.

 

“That would justify my existence.”

gwarner@buffnews.com
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Dr. Kumar Bahuleyan
All it takes is a dream
He had a dream- of turning around his godforsaken village and improving the lot of its people. Unlike other NRIs he came back to India and spent all of his money to achieve this goal.

 

Chemmanakary 1989
An apology for a village, it was a minuscule swampy hinterland. Unemployment was high, there was no sanitation, potable drinking water or healthcare. Majority of the underprivileged inhabitants were caught in a vortex of poverty, starvation and deprivation. Survival was tough and escape from the quagmire-an impossible dream.

 

Chemmanakary 1999
Paddy-fields and tiled houses dot the palm-fringed landscape. A tarred road links Chemmanakary to the rest of Vaikom taluk. Cold storages, provision stores, medical shops, healthcare centres and a super speciality hospital are now a part of the effervescent village, that is clearly on the move.

 

Chemmanakary’s transformation took shape in the hands of a neurosurgeon, Kumar Bahuleyan, who invested his enormous private fortune to better the lives of his country cousins.

 

Born to a physician in the village, times were hard for the poor family. Young Bahuleyan was one of the two survivors in a family of five; three of his siblings died in their childhood. Fighting disease and hunger every step of the way, Bahuleyan struggled to get an education. The young boy’s grit and sheer brilliance carried him through, with the help of many benefactors and government scholarships he went on to acquire a medical degree.

 

Life was no cake walk, but ” I am an eternal optimist”,he says.

 

Bahuleyan’s career, goaded by his ability to circumvent, started going places- the Kerala Government sent him to the UK for neurosurgical training as the state did not have a neurosurgeon at that time. He returned home to the Chinese aggression; the army gobbled him up for the armed forces did not have a qualified neurosurgeon.

 

Three years later he discovered ” the Kerala Government did not have a place for me; my post had been filled by a freshman”. He, a qualified neurosurgeon, had to sit at home twiddling his thumbs waiting for bureaucratic red tape to work around his case. His patience wore thin and a disgusted Bahuleyan fled to Ontario, Canada, seeking employment. He eventually ended up in Buffalo, USA, where for the first time in his life he achieved economic security.

 

Even as he was scaling professional heights, Bahuleyan used to visit Chemmanakary regularly. Fifty years after Independence, the village still did not have potable drinking water, sanitation, electricity, roads and health centres. “Even marginally well-off people had no concept of sanitation”, said Bahuleyan. “Chemmanakary was a beautiful village contaminated by the people’s lack of awareness”.

 

The emotionally aroused doctor was determined to “clean up the mess” and in 1989 established a not-for-profit-private organization to bring basic healthcare to Kerala villages. ” I put all my money of more than Rs 10 crore into the foundation. My attempt was to come back here and do some community work,” he says.

 

The Bahuleyan Charitable Foundation began with a health survey to pick a target area. It chose an area comprising 17 sq. miles with a population of 66,356. The foundation plunged into a latrine construction programme in this area where 5009 of the 18,362 houses did not have latrines. So far 619 latrines meeting WHO standards and costing Rs 4,000 each have been built. “The people initially had no clue what to do with a latrine and started using it as a store room,” says Bahuleyan.

 

In 1993 the foundation built a small clinic in the village to treat pregnant women and children. Demand was so high in spite of poor accessibility (there were no roads leading to the clinic), that the centre was soon upgraded and moved to Vaikom town. The foundation also spent Rs 50 lakh to construct a 6 km road to the main highway and subsidiary roads to link the clinic.

 

The Vaikom wing of The Indo-American Hospital opened in 1995 with 30 beds. ” It was named to highlight the fact that it is built with the money I earned in the U.S. and to acknowledge the American tax payer’s contribution,” explained the doctor.

 

But with most of the patients being poor the hospital was making little by way of revenue and its very existence was threatened. ” I started this whole project out of my sentiments, with no planning,” said Bahuleyan. “However I realized I had to do something revenue generating to make it viable.”
 
A project consultant was roped in and he suggested the idea of building a super specialty hospital to attract paying patients. “We decided to have a neuro centre in Chemmanakary and opened with the most modern equipment in November 1996.”

 

A super specialty hospital in the hinterlands?

 

“Why not?” asked the doctor.” Hospitals are all built in cities which are inaccessible to the villagers. I want to develop my village and its economy. Treatment here is at roughly one-third the cost of city hospitals and free on cost for the poor.”

 

The hospital today is the hub of life in Chemmanakary. Indeed a far cry from the early days when the villagers viewed Bahuleyan and his motives with suspicion.

 

Most of the work force in the hospital is locally drawn, except for the specialized slots. ” Thanks to the hospital, our youth have a channel of employment. Agriculture has received an impetus and the general quality of life here has improved.” Said Sivaramakrishnan, 62. “Our sick people do not die for want of medical attention any more,” said Zuhara Begum, 45. “What more do we need?”

 

According to Bahuleyan if “all the NRIs adopted a village each in India and did something for its people, underdevelopment in this country would soon be a thing of the past. When I hear these so-called NRIs crib about the lack of facilities here I tell them that the problem is with them and not with the country, It’s they who have changed, not the land- after all, weren’t they living here at one point in time? They come back and build huge mansions, with that money I can build 100 or more latrines. Don’t we all owe a little something to our motherland?”

 

Though he pleads guilty of having strayed from his original vision of bringing general healthcare assistance to Chemmanakary, Bahuleyan says that he is taking steps to rectify this. He plans to upgrade the Vaikom clinic into a centre of excellence for women and children.

 

A multilingual learning centre is also under construction where the doctor plans to introduce computers and Internet facilities.” ” I am targeting the children here, ” he says. ” I want to take them off the streets so that in future even the specialized posts in the hospital can be filled by local hands.”
 

The doctor claims to be a “in a state of nirvana” today. He says: ” I am a dreamer; a professor of ideas. Everything I have achieved in my life is because of my dreams.”

 

“I have also done some unpardonable things in my life,” he says with a laugh. “But for a village boy desperate to do something, the world didn’t offer very many choices.”

 

However, it’s yesterday no more; the little boy has grown up and today the world is his oyster. And Chemmanakary has finally made it to the map and the millennium- electricity, drinking water, health care and all.

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Let noble thoughts come to us from all sides
Rig Veda