[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the our voices Oral Histories podcast, coordinated by the common room and presented by Dr. Andy Clark, research associate with the Newcastle Oral History Collective.
In this episode, we talk to Chandra Vimuri, a civil engineer from Hyderabad in India who is a self employed engineering consultant as well as teaching in higher and further education.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: My father was a civil engineer, as I said, and he had a bit of a stab in mining sector very early on in his career. Okay. So when I was about 16, I wanted to get into either mining, I wanted to become either a mining engineer or a civil engineer. Okay. And it so happened that I did pursue civil engineering.
And when I was at school, we had something called menstruation in maths. It's, it's a part of maths which was working out heights, distances and shapes. And when I was, I must have been about 13 when we had that. And I remember sitting down with my dad and doing it with him. I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed being a student.
I enjoyed the process of asking questions, and I was always the one who was asking the most embarrassing question in the class.
I never felt shy about asking questions.
I chose engineering because I think my mind works this way, in a sense that I can see the physical model of a concept in civil engineering. In the sense if you do some numbers about a building, those numbers really mean, really translate to something physical.
It's not quite the same with computing.
So I'm not very good at algorithms or computer software generally, because my mind needs a physical construct or a link between a physical model and an idea.
In a way, it was comfortable and convenient for me to get into engineering, and my father being a civil engineer made that more easier, I would say.
[00:02:32] Speaker C: So what was your trajectory once you finished school? Was it university education or was it in the workplace?
[00:02:39] Speaker B: The way it works in India is you either have the option of doing twelve year schooling and then study a degree or an undergraduate program after twelve years of schooling, or you do ten years of schooling and do a bridge course, a pre university course, and then start university. So my mind was ten years of schooling, so I left school when I was about late 15, so 16 before my 16th birthday, and I did a three year diploma course in civil engineering.
After diploma, I did an undergraduate degree in civil engineering. Okay. And I worked for a couple of years and I was wanting to study abroad, pursue civil engineering in a country where civil engineering careers are better paid and the industry is more organized.
And it had to be. And because I didn't speak any other language, any language other than English or any western language other than English, it had to be an english speaking country. So, UK or us?
[00:04:00] Speaker C: So what was it that made you pick the UK over the US? Was there anything specific about the program or the accident?
[00:04:10] Speaker B: There was. I have cousins who live in the United States and I was initially hoping to study in the States, but it didn't quite work. I wasted about a year or so, and Dundee university representative, one of the professors, came to Hyderabad and he was giving a talk and he was on a recruitment mission.
This is a man called Professor Ravindradhir is a preeminent expert in concrete, concrete technology.
He happens to be of north indian origin.
Man in his eighty s now, I think is fairly advanced in his years now. And he is quite a charismatic character, larger than life figure.
And literally, I came to Dundee because of him.
And you'll find this. Many Indians say this because there were lots of Indians at Dundee when I came to Dundee and they all had the same warmth for this character and is.
Yeah. And it's. It's.
I think what attracted me or what I found quite inspirational about him is this cross cultural competence.
So he clearly is indian in some fashion, despite having spent more than 50 years in this country.
But in a 20 minutes interview, he was able to demonstrate to me that he was competent in operating in two completely divergent cultural contexts. And I found it fascinating because a lot of Indians who move abroad don't manage to make the transition.
It doesn't make them less intelligent, it just culturally, they just remain where they were when they first left India. But this man had that.
He's just a charismatic individual, and I somehow falsely believed that following him to Dundee would turn me into him and I'm nowhere like him.
So a strange reason why I came to Dundee.
[00:06:49] Speaker C: When you came to Dundee, was that a master's program or a PhD?
[00:06:52] Speaker B: It was a master's in structural engineering. Okay. Yeah.
[00:06:56] Speaker C: So you've left a city of 10 million to move to one of Scotland's smaller cities.
[00:07:02] Speaker B: I have fond memories of Dundee because I had a really good year in Dundee, and it's a very different city now compared to where it was 16 years ago. Even in the last decade, there's been a lot of investment put into the riverside and it looks very different.
I had pictures of tall buildings and a scottish version of New York, and Dundee is nothing like New York.
And it was the stone buildings with really dark exterior. The dark exterior formed by centuries of precipitation, uncleaned surfaces, and the grayness of those buildings in a gray city that was difficult to get used to.
But I think one makes a choice to move abroad and one's mind is more or less prepared to adapt and just not make a big deal of it and. And learn to be a part of it. And so the first six months, these the difference between coming from a busy place to a relatively quiet scottish city.
It was hard during the first six months, but then I managed to just accepted it and it stopped bothering me. Yeah.
[00:08:55] Speaker C: Because when you talked about before we started recording about that you live near the hindu temple. Sorry, Temple. And that you became part of that kind of community, what was that like, kind of interacting with the hindu community in Scotland? Was it different from back home or was it a kind of comfort blanket almost, in terms of familiarity, it was a comfort blanket.
[00:09:25] Speaker B: And I lived literally about 100 yards from the hindu temple on Perth Road, as the Scots call it, Peth Road, Pethrot.
So I could just walk to the temple. And in those days, the temple only opened on Sundays and during major hindu festivals, so Sunday was something to look forward to. And also, before moving to UK, I'd never cooked.
So having a meal properly cooked by somebody else, somebody who knew how to cook, was something to look forward to.
But I sing, as I was mentioning before, not well, but I don't necessarily sing well, but I like the act of singing.
So the temple every Sunday had several hours, a couple of hours of prayers and before lunch there was singing and I would partake in that singing and I would sit in the front row and sing. And that somehow earned me the affection of the elderly residents of have.
I had fond memories of bonding with the elderly. In Dundee, it's different from India because it's a confluence of people from different parts of South Asia, which is not what it is. In my hometown, you find majority people speaking my native language, which is Telugu, whereas in Dundee you had people who originally come from different parts and spoke different languages.
So there is some adjustment to be done, but the fact that we were able to sing and I was able to join in and I was getting free meal, delicious free meal, made me connect with them and have a good time. Yeah.
[00:11:55] Speaker D: Following the discussion about life in Dundee, Chandra discussed living and working in the northeast of England. However, his memories were laced with his sense of being an outsider. Andy asked him to explain this further.
[00:12:10] Speaker B: I don't regret moving to UK and I've had a rich life. Rich as in, in terms of the quality of my lived experience. I've had a rich life, having moved to UK, and I've grown as a professional? I have absolutely no doubts about that. But over the years I have wondered if a person of my kind is desirable in the UK.
[00:12:52] Speaker C: What do you mean?
[00:12:55] Speaker B: There's a use for someone like myself.
I could be a productive member of a team and I could be a useful employee.
Over the years I've been involved quite extensively in voluntary work, either working with professional bodies like institutional structural engineers, or at the moment I sit on the committee of Chartered Institute of Highways and Transportation.
But I leave with the feeling that there's a point beyond which.
There's a point beyond which I'm not welcome. Okay. In the sense that, yeah, socially I would say.
I don't know how else I would put it, but I think I've had to make quite a lot of adjustments in myself, in my personality, the way I present myself to be relevant in the UK.
And I would like that to be respected, and I would like that to be given some credit, because it is difficult for somebody who comes from a completely different cultural context to actively try and belong.
And I don't think the efforts I've made this is more relevant in terms of my experience since moving to the northeast of England that I don't think the efforts I've made have been either reciprocated or duly acknowledged.
And I find thinking about it does make me wonder whether it would ever change.
[00:15:20] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, what kind of efforts to belong, what things have you proactively done or changed to, as you say, make yourself more relevant, as you put it.
[00:15:36] Speaker B: I don't mean the first one's your.
[00:15:39] Speaker C: Name, because you said straight away you've anglicized your name and even you don't even pronounce it Chandra. You pronounce it Chandra. So is it things like that, or is it in a more kind of substantial way as a person?
[00:15:49] Speaker B: No, more substantially. For instance, I've been part of engineering professional bodies and I've been the coordinator for these engineering professional bodies, organize technical meeting series, technical events, about half a dozen in Newcastle and half a dozen in Teesside. And for about a decade I was responsible for organizing, finding speakers and coordinating with the venue and preparing promotional material and so on. This has nothing to do with paid work. This is completely voluntary.
And there was a point when there were only a handful of us who kept the institution's operations in the northeast of England active. Had we decided not to contribute, the institution would have hardly had any technical events happening in this part of the country.
And so you end up working with people you spend a lot of time with, these colleagues who you think are friends and.
And we. I don't know, it's.
So there were several hundreds of hours over the years that were given to this cause and that was spent with these individuals and for them. For none of them to have any interest in me, in my personal life and me, the person just makes me wonder, really wonder.
I just feel if I was an Italian or if I was a spaniard or if I was an american, if I was white, I would be treated very differently, even in a friendship context or in professional context. The competence I bring on board would be perceived very differently if I was white. And the fact that I look different, I speak with the funny foreign accent does have a bearing on some of my professional and private mean.
[00:18:36] Speaker C: We're kind of scutting around it. But I suppose the crux of the point is, in your professional experience as an engineer in the northeast, do you feel that your racial ethnic background has been a hindrance in terms of how people relate with you?
[00:18:54] Speaker B: This is completely subjective, and this is no criticism of individuals, but I just think that if I was white, irrespective of my.
No, actually, if I was from Western Europe or from the good bits of northern America, as some colleagues put it, then even more desirable is northern Europe, because if I was a Dane or a norwegian or a swedish person, my competence would be given far greater credence than I receive as an immigrant indian. So if. If you are an immigrant from an ex colony, I think you have to work twice as hard, at least twice as hard, to prove your competence.
I have to say that I've been in several boardrooms and colleagues have been exceptionally kind. And I have made very warm connections with several people in the northeast of England and UK wide.
But despite that, despite the warmth I've received, I carry this niggle that I'm judged before I enter a room. And the judgment is on the grounds that I'm immigrant of certain kind. Yeah.
I cannot give any objective justification or evidence or objective proof for this, but this is how I feel.
Based on my personal experience, I could be wrong. I could be.
[00:21:04] Speaker C: But you feel it.
[00:21:06] Speaker B: But this is how I feel.
[00:21:07] Speaker C: Yeah, that's how it's perceived.
Has that ever played out overtly? Because one of the things that I've noticed in kind of following the civil rights movement over the last few months with BLM and things is a lot of people in the UK with foreign names, sharing experiences of applying for a flat, etc. And being rejected based on once someone hears your name. Has it ever been that overt in your experience? Or has it been a bit more kind of subtly experience in terms of that colonial relationship?
[00:21:41] Speaker B: I was on the trustee board of a charitable organization I was recruited to earlier this year, and I left it soon after George Floyd's death.
And what happened during my brief presence on the trustee board of this organization could be viewed well, in their own admission, is based on the grounds of race, so that's as overt as it gets.
They have reflected on the series of incidents, and they've written to me and they've written to me to say that they're going to understand this better and put corrective actions where possible.
And if I was as the only non white on the trustee board of an organization whose remit falls spears into human rights, if I've experienced that there, I don't have to say anymore that I would have had more widespread experience. Yeah. And another classic example of how racism works is in 2017, there was an event held on Tynebridge called this was in in commemoration of 50 years of Martin Luther King's.
[00:23:28] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, I was just namoved. It was late in the year, wasn't it?
[00:23:32] Speaker B: November, December.
[00:23:32] Speaker C: Yeah, I remember that.
[00:23:34] Speaker B: And there was one of this displays, or one of the parts of this coming together was to do with an incident which happened in north India called Jalianwala Bagh.
The exact number of people who were killed is questioned, but at least a thousand people have been shot in a closed compound due to the orders of an english general because India was under a british rule at that time.
I complained.
I was involved during rehearsals of that event, and I found who was representing Jelly and Vala park, and I complained to the organizing committee and said, look, you can't do this.
They had lights colored. Well, I wouldn't really know where they were from. They had people who were light colored. Clearly not Indians or Pakistanis. And the people who died are either of present day India or present day Pakistan origin.
So Newcastle has a large south asian community.
Could they not have had a few dozen indian or pakistani or bangladeshi people doing that? Why did they need white people? And why did they carry mexican artifacts? Day of the dead skull, what do you call them?
Not puppets, but I don't know the.
[00:25:29] Speaker C: Name of them, but I know what you mean.
[00:25:31] Speaker B: That's cultural misappropriation. Yeah. Now, Britain has not properly apologized for the jelly and Walabagh incident. Now, if this happens with any other historical event, if somebody.
I don't know, somebody wears inappropriate clothing during a second world war commemoration event, how would it be perceived?
And my complaint in an email form and physical protest didn't even get any far. And they had, I mean if one can find this in video footings of that event, that they had white people playing indians, when white person ordered the death of a few thousand Indians, how is that culturally okay?
Because Indians won't ask because there's a certain level of lax approach and I don't know, I live here, I love my life in this country, and I have very warm connections, and majority of my clients are white, they treat me with respect, and a lot of my clients introduce me to other clients who also happen to be white. You are white, you've treated me with respect, you've shown me, and you're giving your time to speak to me. So I'm not saying that everything is awful, but what I am saying is that there is a definite qualitative difference s in how I am perceived, and a white version of me would be perceived.
And can I prove it? I can't prove it because this is a subjective experience formed on lived experience, but I think this is quite possibly the experience of a lot of people coming from a lot of immigrants coming from ex colonies.
[00:28:04] Speaker D: Following the conversation on the prejudice that Chandra had witnessed as an immigrant into the UK, a conversation much longer than the abridged version, here, Andy turned to the subject of his work in life. After completing his studies in Dundee, Chandra had been an engineering lecturer in Britain, but in 2017 he decided to leave education and return to practice, setting up his own civil engineering consultancy business.
[00:28:30] Speaker C: Because you said about the education system and how different it was, but it's also quite a career change from educating engineers to hands on design consultancy. What was it, do you think, that attracted you back to that practice based employment rather than educational?
[00:28:51] Speaker B: Being a one man company, which I was until three months ago, gave me some level of control over my own destiny, a massive pay cut.
But I like the idea of not having to prove myself to somebody who did not really understand my work.
So my fate was decided by somebody who did not understand my contributions as a structural engineering lecturer.
But in private practice, especially as somebody who works for themselves, I have to work with clients individually and I have to work with professionals, architects and builders individually, and if I'm able to earn their respect, it's more easy to manage than having to belong and prove myself in the rigidity of institutional structures, which I came to a point, I couldn't do it anymore.
We all need to earn for a living and we all have to, pardon my language, but we all have to prostitute ourselves in some degree, but I can't go to an extent where I'm lying to myself every single day.
And university employment would have been that remaining in university employment would have been about lying to myself.
And I'm not the best.
I'm not the best civil engineer, I'm not the best structural engineer, not even in the city, not probably, not even in the street, but I feel I deserved better treatment.
And by remaining at these institutions, I would be saying to them, and I would be saying to everybody else, that the way they behave is okay. The way they behave is not okay.
And as a single man, I'm able to make this judgment. I have a certain freedom to move.
And I think if you're married and especially if you have young children, you're less mobile.
So I thought that's what it is.
[00:31:56] Speaker C: And what's been some of the kind of big jobs that you've had since you've went into consultancy? What have been some of the kind.
[00:32:04] Speaker B: Of majority of my work is residential structures and it's actually.
And I've.
And I've had a couple of commercial schemes as well. They were on West Road.
These are old buildings being converted to large, open plan commercial spaces.
And there's one particular site on West Road which has complex.
It's a very large site and it has a potential for being developed into a hotel and a gym. And that's what the planning application was for. But it also has complex geological problems.
There's a mine shaft at about 20 meters below ground level. Yeah.
My involvement has been to get the client, convince the planning authorities that the foundation we have designed will keep the structure stable.
[00:33:21] Speaker C: Yeah, there's quite a lot of that in Newcastle, isn't there, in terms of rabbit warrens underneath from the old main structures.
[00:33:28] Speaker B: And there's another major development currently in conversations with. This is a large site in Hertfordshire.
I don't know if that's the correct english way of saying it. I think so I'm asking the wrong man.
So this is a site in excess of 200 acres, and majority of it is unsuitable for planning development, housing development. So that's a major scheme.
That would be a big, massive feather in my company's hat as it progresses, as that scheme progresses.
[00:34:10] Speaker C: I mean, how did it feel when you first chucked your job and started your own company? What was that feeling like? Obviously, you thought about being. Working for yourself, but were you worried, concerned about being successful?
[00:34:26] Speaker B: I.
How my, my biggest. Well, I mean, I was fearful of the financial implications, but I'm. I'm not new to fun.
I think my philosophical approach to life is such that I have limited attachment with objects in the sense there's a flat where I go and sleep with great difficulty. I call it my flat because I don't belong to a place or I don't belong to a building and the building doesn't belong to me.
So I don't have a great deal of attachment, of physical things.
I'm attached to two things, three things. My laptop, because in the absence of it I wouldn't be able to function as a business.
My passport, so that I can travel, my mobile phone on which I spend a lot of time. Apart from that I have very limited sense of.
Compared to other people I'm relatively more liberated in terms of the fear of being financially impacted upon because the most challenging thing is the fear of losing everything you own and I'm somewhat detached when it comes to that. So that was easy to handle. But what was challenging was asking myself repeatedly whether I was right.
I'm probably not in the same.
Even though I spent about a decade, twelve years teaching, I had some of my fingers dipped in the industry so I didn't really start from scratch. So I had contacts and I was able to seek help and in the absence of their help I wouldn't have survived even a month. Yeah, so I have to admit that.
[00:36:55] Speaker C: No, absolutely. And what part of structural or civil engineering is it that you enjoy most? If you think about different jobs you've been on or different challenges, is there a specific part where you think if you get a job spec in you go, oh, brilliant. It's to do with this. And I really enjoy this, but.
[00:37:17] Speaker B: The bits I've really enjoyed are really small jobs where when you figure out actually how is this building built, you feel a strong sense of gratification. There was a job in North Shields I had about a year ago, it's about 150 year old stone building, and we were installing some, I designed some steel members to support the first floor because they were changing, they were getting rid of some walls and they were changing the usage of the building and the builder and I and the client, who's somewhat technically knowledgeable, we spent a whole afternoon trying to find out where the load was going, how the roof was supported and how the floors were supported. And my fee for that job was about. Was 200 pounds. But I learned a lot that afternoon.
And also what's quite gratifying is when, especially as somebody who transitioned from full time academic position to practicing engineer, when a colleague who's spent all of their life in practice, looked at what I've done and said they're happy with it.
That really was quite gratifying, because a lot of clients are not technically knowledgeable and the advice you give them, they take it on face value. But if somebody who spent about 25 years relatively in senior positions in the industry looks at the report you've written or looks at the solution you have come up with and says they're happy with it, then that's quite a lovely feeling. Yeah. Going back to your original question, what do I really enjoy?
Most enjoyable are old buildings, really old buildings where you are figuring out how this building works, because no two buildings are the same. And it's sometimes quite tricky knowing what will happen if you remove a wall, even something as simple as removing a wall.
So making changes to old stone houses is something I found quite interesting, technically.
[00:40:00] Speaker C: Yeah, certainly the right region for it. There's a lot of that in the.
[00:40:04] Speaker B: Northeast and the conservation aspect of it as well, because a lot of that skill that they had 150 years ago hasn't really been retained. In a sense, they weren't just builders, they weren't just masons, they were actually fully competent engineers themselves.
They may not have had degrees to prove that.
So getting into the mind of somebody who is just lifting stone and building walls and trying to understand their thought pattern is quite an interesting thing to do.
[00:40:42] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:40:44] Speaker A: Our voices is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund in association with the common room and Dr. Andy Clark. To find out more about the work of the common room, please visit www.thecommonroom.org uk or email
[email protected] uk.
