Kalpalatha
Guntupalli was the first female president of American
Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (AAPI). A
Doctor by profession graduated in India, she hailed from a
middle class family where both her parents were teachers.
She came to America in 1970s to search for a better job,
during that time there was a great demand of doctors in
US. Now the number of international medical graduates is
around 1,60,000 of the total 6,50,000 physicians. |
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She has proved
that Indian women are not confined to the tradition of marriage,
children and family. She has changed the entire demarcation and
headed an organisation like AAPI. Whether it’s traveling to
space like astronaut Kalpana Chawla or becoming a fusion chef
like Raji Jallepalli, who owns the award-winning Restaurant
Rajji in Memphis, women are breaking barriers in a
male-dominated world. It’s a world whose boundaries are set
only by your own imagination.
On
the walls of her office at Ben Taub are pictures of her
with fomer US President Clinton and Hillary Rodham
Clinton. In the emergency rooms below, however, the
indigent patients are lined up, gurneys pressed together,
the dinged-out and the damaged, with no insurance, waiting
their turns and soiling their sheets. |
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It is a good hospital, but the one that
draws some of the sickest patients, the street people, with nowhere else to go. Many of
the doctors bustling about in their white jackets are immigrants.
Not only are a
majority of Indian women in America working, many are in senior
positions and headed for the top. Take the highly competitive
medical field: when the powerful American Association of
Physicians of Indian Origin (AAPI) convened in Dallas, Texas, to
announce its new executive committee, a significant milestone
was reached. For Dr. Kalpalatha K. Guntupalli, this high-profile
organization representing the largest foreign medical group in
the United States, with a membership of 9,200, had chosen a
woman president for the first time in its 16-year history.
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