I was born and raised in my early life in a village in India which had neither running water or electricity. My parents foresight in immigrating to the United States, to give their children better opportunity, was both risky and courageous. Both of those are both attributes that my parents have instilled in their children.

From my father, we learned the hard work ethic, from my mother we learned empathy, compassion, and love and respect for fellow human beings.

These traits continue to manifest in all of their children’s lives. The work ethic from my father helped me in getting through a grueling surgical residency where my life was spent working 36 hours followed by respite for 12 hours and then starting all over again – for five years. The empathy and compassion in taking care of these patients was something I learned from my mother.

One particular episode that I remember with both fondness and humor is that after five years of working over 100 hours a week I was finally ready to graduate from my surgical program and my parents had come to my graduation and they were told that I scored in the top 2% of the nation on my surgical exams my mother turned to my father and asked “Yeh doctor buhn gyah”?

Is he a doctor yet?

I think by nature plastic surgery is a very creative specialty within medicine. I’ve been very fortunate to have one of the Premier plastic surgery practices in California but it hasn’t been based on just randomness but rather significant hard work where I took call sometimes 25 nights a month at various hospitals so I could build a name for myself and by doing technically very difficult operations successfully. As Such my reputation grew in the community and now I have a very busy cosmetic surgery practice.

At the end of the day, your reputation is everything. People Will seek you out based on your reputation,
And even though it’s a cliché, I think it’s important for you to treat every potential patient or client how you expect someone to treat your family.

I had initially gone to school to be a writer, yet being the son of immigrant Indian parents that was not an option that was open to me so I went into medicine . Now 25 years later I’m getting back to my passion of writing and have published a book called
Animal, which is about a vigilante serial killer who goes after people who kill or torture animals.

My second book called PigMan is being reviewed for publication. Both of these novels are dystopian medical novels which weave my training as a surgeon into the story.

I bring this example up to illustrate how you can have one career choice and branch off in other things as you evolve as a human being so will diverse interests evolve.

I always try to give back to the community, in that respect I have medical students and pre-medical students that shadow me on a monthly basis and I try to spend time overseas doing Cleft lip and palate surgery and congenital birthday defects because impacting someone’s life at that level is more impactful than any monetary gain.

If I had to do it all over again, I would go into plastic surgery again. I find that career choice to fit my personality and it is one of the only parts of Medicine that you can still be autonomous and not answer to hospitals and insurance companies. I did want to be a writer when I went to college I’ve been able to get back to that after 20 years and practice so I’ve been able to fulfill both career choices.