For a Sikh mother, who lost her struggling 43-year-old business- man husband to a heart attack, raising two daughters alone in New York wasadauntingtask. But
when both her daughters, Sheena (who was
not even 13) and Jasmin, who was five,
started going blind you can well imagine the
despair their mom Kuldeep Sethi would
have felt.
The girls grew up as conservative, obser-
vant Sikhs. Sheena, now 40, Kuldeep’s first-
born, writes in The Artof Choosing that she
even wore underwear (the kacha that can
never be taken off) while bathing as per
orthodox Sikh rituals.
But the visits to the gurdwara stopped
after their father Kanwarjit Singh Sethi’s
death. “Mom did not want people looking at
us with their pitying eyes,” recalls Sheena S
Iyengar (who uses her husband Garud’s last
name), about two decades after her father’s
death. Her mother also thought some peo-
ple may make fun of her daughters.
“On one hand, she would sound fatalistic
wondering what sins she might have com-
mitted in her previous life that she has two
blind daughters,” remembers Iyengar, who
was born in Canada but raised in New York
and then later in a small town in New
Jersey. “On the other hand, she felt proud
that we were doing very well in the school,”
she adds.
“[Atthesametime] she would use a lot of
Indian metaphors to make us feel strong,”
Sheena says. “She would talk about the lilies
growing in the middle of muddied water,
and even if the diamond is under lots of
mud, ultimately it is a diamond. My mother
received a lot of encouragement when a
school counselor gave her a poem which
said god chose special people to be the
mothers of handicapped children.”
No one knows more about limited choices
than Sheena S Iyengar. The Columbia
professor’s The Art of Choosing looks at life
choices in wholly new light. Arthur J Pais
reports
Hail the
DecisionGuru
A distinguished psychologist, Sheena is a
professor at Columbia University. She
recently made news as the author of The Art
of Choice, a mass market hardcover that
studies how we make simple and complex
decisions. One of the most discussed books,
in recent months, it has also received excel-
lent acknowledgements from two
MacArthur ‘genius’ awardees, the best-sell-
ing writers Malcolm Gladwell (Blink) and
Dr Atul Gawande (Checklist). The book,
featured in The Economist, The New York
Times and Newsweek, is dedicated to: ‘Dad,
who told me anything was possible, and
Mom, for being there every step of the way’.
Her parents, particularly her mother, did
not recognize her condition when she began
bumping into things when she was three.
An ophthalmologist diagnosed her with
retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic condition
that progressively leads to total blindness.
Her parents, who were second cousins, were
devastated by the discovery, but they also
fought hard to help her to be independent
and a high achiever. By 12 she was totally
blind.
Iyengar remembers that after reading an
article about a blind psychologist in
Reader’s Digest, her father thought Sheena
could be one too. “We were driving one day,
and he said you can become a psychologist,
all you have to do is listen and talk,” she
recalls. “It was understood very early in my
life that my sister and I had to learn to stand
on our own feet.”
Her interest in choice began while grow-
ing up as a blind girl in a strict Sikh home in
America. She longed for the individuality of
her American peers. In high school she
decided she had to make her own choices.
Sheena, who studied at Wharton, and then
went on to earn a PhD at Stanford, says. ‘For
a blind Sikh girl, otherwise subject to so
many restrictions, this was a very powerful
idea,’ she muses in her book.
She says she admired how her non-Indian
peers considered choice a right. She began
carrying out small acts of rebellion, she said
in an interview: ‘I wore sleeveless dresses
and skirts, I showed cleavage, I dated... But
I didn’t do drugs.’ Sheena talks calmly but
with conviction. She laughs from time to
time and her eyes, many people say, are
looking into the souls of the listeners.
Her father, who had started an import
business and was struggling to make a
decent profit, collapsed on a sidewalk in
New York and died in 1983. Her mother had
a government job but subsequently started
preparing for exams that would give her a
promotion and offer a better salary.
Simultaneously Sheena had to make
many hard decisions, involving her mom,
on going to Wharton at University of
Pennsylvania. “There were many people
who discouraged me from doing what I
wanted to do,” she says. “But I had to forge
ahead. Fortunately my mother understood
