YOUR HEART IS MINE
Our mother (and late father) – conjoined in an inter-faith marriage -- witnessed the savagery and barbarism of religious bigotry and communal hatreds in horrific incidents that characterized the partition of the Indian Sub-continent in 1947 which pushed them ultimately to emigrate to the U.K. and, later, the United States. They emigrated to the U.S. in late 1965, settling in Northern California initially, then moving to Illinois when our father completed his graduate studies at the University of Chicago in 1972.  Mother’s early years of marriage – after the horrors of Partition -- were characterized by relative affluence and social engagement as a committed volunteer with non-profits assisting underprivileged women and children

‘…This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples;
no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our
own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness…’.
Dalai Lama*
*A Policy of Kindness (1990)

in Pakistan and, later, in England. In the U.S., however, as many immigrants before them, our parents were confronted with the challenges of ‘starting over’ in a new country with limited financial resources. Mother began her life as a professional banker in the U.S., as she told us, when she was just under 40 years old.

A LIFE OF LEARNING, DISCIPLINE AND COMPASSION
Along with running our family household, our mother worked long hours to obtain needed U.S. professional credentials from the American Banking Association. This improved her marketability and provided our family with supporting financial resources. During those challenging years, she lived the values of continued self-improvement, tempered with empathy, respect and caring for others. She admonished her two young children to double-down on their efforts to achieve the best education possible. The promise arising out of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s had imbued our parents with much hope and inspiration. They encouraged their children to take advantage of the wonderful spectrum of American freedom and opportunity.

A LEGACY IN JUNE
What has been and is at the core of our mother’s approach to life – and that of our late father – is her deep commitment to secular liberalism grounded in a profound respect for eclectic sources of learning from every part of the world. Our mother views secular liberalism as more than a political label; for her, it’s a moral discipline because she witnessed, first -hand, the horrific results of religious bigotry during India’s Partition. By stripping away religious (or any) dogma and emphasizing reason, Mother pushed us to aspire to a thoughtfulness that tolerates difference and sees another’s rights as equal to our own. She saw this as a constant engine for self-improvement requiring us to challenge our own biases and respect differing perspectives.

A type of common bond unexpectedly developed between our mother (and late father), given horrors of India’s Partition, and close Jewish friends in the U.S. whose families had experienced the atrocities of the Holocaust during World War II. For our mother (and late father), the ultimate firewall against bigotry and
fascism was and remains to commit oneself sincerely to the idea that our world is, essentially, one family – and to look for what engenders respect and inclusiveness (not without irony and humor on occasion) between and among each one of us.

A MOST HAPPY 99th BIRTHDAY TO OUR DEAREST MOTHER!
For a bit more on the imperatives that inspired our mother and her commitment to a country that was at the heart of secular liberalism in the 1950s and 1960s, see her interview some years ago recorded in South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA): https://firstdays.saada.org/story/sarware-sita-tiwana