Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Friday Review | Cinema Plus | Young World | Property Plus | Quest |

The recipe for success

Photo: V.V. Krishnan

a different court Anu Peshawaria enjoying her lunch at the Coffee Shop of Le Meridien in New Delhi

I am here at a good time. I love mangoes and they are in plenty now,” the glint in Anu Peshawaria’s eyes adds garnish to her delight. Over the last two days, she relates, with such enthusiasm, “Between myself and my son, we have polished off a kilo.” In Fremont, her home for many years now in the U.S., “Mangoes are five dollars a kilo and here, you will find cartful of them all around you.”

Anu, younger sister of Kiran Bedi, is a former tennis player who went on to play at the Wimbledon way back in the ’80s, and is now a successful immigration attorney in America. Visiting India after a year, she is on a stopover visit to Delhi, her native city, on her way to Venice, to take part in a forum that would discuss the issue of “The European migration policy in the new world order.”

Our chitchat over mangoes is a prelude to a working lunch at the Coffee Shop of Le Meridien. She soon gets down to talking about her Venice trip. “There will be speakers like Tony Blair, former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo Puce de Leon in the annual forum organised by UniCredit Group,” she says, underlining the fact that she is the only one from America. “I look at it as a great honour for India,” she states. With the U.K. having come out with a new immigrant policy and other European countries mulling over pros and cons of welcoming immigrants, Anu feels there will be lot of meat to chew on there. “I would highlight the point that you can’t possibly stop migration. It is human nature to go from one place to another. The only practical way is to make it legal and formulate ways to make them useful to the new country,” she states her point.

After a heavy breakfast, Anu is not quite hungry at lunch time. With a friendly waiter handing out the menu card, she has second thoughts though, and picks a chicken dish, adding, “I love chicken.” It comes with a garlic sauce, garnished with broccoli, red pepper, celery sticks and parsley.

Digging in, Anu continues, “Through my NGO Seva Legal Aid, we have been organising a lot of citizen workshops across America in a variety of subjects including immigration.” Immigration, being a subject with many foils, most immigrants, she says, don’t know the right options available to them. “Many think that investing one million dollars in the U.S. is the only way to get a green card. But I know of ways where you invest only 20000 dollars to get a green card and it is completely legal.” Not just Indians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, Anu says a lot of Chinese and Japanese migrants sign in for these workshops.

The conversation soon swerves back to food, and Anu says since her son loves paneer, she has learnt many paneer-based dishes. “I have learnt about 20 paneer dishes,” counts the writer of “The Immigrant’s Dream”, a comprehensive guidebook for those willing to migrate to America.

Involved with many things which include an occasional commentary for a tennis match to coaching kids in Fremont to travelling for her client cases across India, the U.S. and Canada, where she has recently opened an office, Anu obviously has very little free time. Wrapping up her lunch, she counts her blessings, “I have a lady to take care of things at home, a privilege which many rich Americans don’t have. She has been with me for years. Otherwise, I would not have been able to do so many things.” One of the biggest advantages of having her is home cooked food at the end of a tiring day, she adds.

Anu wraps up her lunch with a dessert. She gives a reason, laced with a laugh, “Desserts tend to sit in my tummy for long.” You leave her toying with the idea of enjoying a hot cup of coffee with her teenage son.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail