Although Kartik Venkatesh '06 is graduating this year, Commencement does not spell an end to the senior's career at Brown. A student in the Program in Liberal Medical Education, which guarantees his admission to the Brown Medical School, the Ohio native was also recently accepted the University's Ph.D. program in community health, meaning that he will spend at least eight more years in Providence.
"I'll hopefully leave Brown at that point," he said with a laugh.
But Venkatesh, an anthropology and Sanskrit double concentrator, is looking forward to his future at Brown. He plans to pursue research on HIV and AIDS in developing countries, beginning this summer, when he will travel to southern India. There, Venkatesh will look at the role of gender, class, caste and other social factors in HIV transmission, as well as the reproduction of stigmas and discrimination regarding HIV and AIDS.
Venkatesh is no stranger to fieldwork in India, having spent a total of three months conducting anthropological fieldwork in southern India. He first focused on examining families involved in traditional Sanskrit scholarship, which Venkatesh said has decreased significantly since the onset of British colonialism and the growth of secular professions.
While in India, Venkatesh enjoyed conducting interviews and interacting with people he met but also said he had several "awkward" encounters during his research.
"Some people wouldn't let me into their houses and would only let me interview them on their porches because I was viewed as ritually impure or unclean to come inside," he said. "Every time I'd leave their houses, they would pull out the cow dung, because cow dung is considered a purifying substance."
"I guess cow dung is purer than me," he added with a grin.
Venkatesh said his ability to conduct research was aided by previous experience in India and exposure to Tamil, the language spoken in the southeastern part of the country. Both of his parents are Indian, though neither grew up there, and his grandparents left southern India as teenagers. Venkatesh's heritage afforded him some linguistic experience - but not only to Tamil. Growing up, Venkatesh also gained exposure to Sanskrit, because the ancient language appeared in many Indian and Hindu rituals and events. This early interest in Sanskrit played a chief role in Venkatesh's decision to attend Brown - the only school he applied to outside of the state of Ohio and the only place where he could both be a pre-med and study Sanskrit as an undergraduate.
At Brown, Venkatesh began taking introductory Sanskrit classes, which entailed "a lot of boring grammar," he said. Then, through an Undergraduate Teaching and Research Assistantship as well as a Royce Fellowship, Venkatesh undertook anthropological fieldwork to investigate how Indian immigrant communities in the U.S. transport their ritual traditions to a new country, and what role a classical language like Sanskrit plays in the transition.
Following his sophomore year, Venkatesh translated numerous ritual texts from Sanskrit to English, an exercise he said was as much a study in English as it was in Sanskrit.
"It's easy to translate texts into English," Venkatesh said. "To make a good translation was the tough part, to make it something that was cross-culturally relevant and applicable."
Venkatesh continued to pursue these interests in two concentration theses. His anthropology thesis centers on the Indian immigration diaspora and looks at social issues in the South Asian and Indian communities in the United States. It examines questions of gender, class and even popular culture, such as bhangra music and Bollywood cinema. For his Sanskrit thesis, he translated about five Sanskrit festivals into English and analyzed the rituals and histories associated with the texts.
But Venkatesh's research does not end there. The senior has been a long-time volunteer at the Rhode Island Free Clinic in south Providence, where he works as an interpreter for the clinic's primarily Hispanic patients. Over the course of the past year and over the summer, Venkatesh conducted research as part of a study organized by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. The study analyzed the correspondence between high rates of asthma and psychiatric problems, such as anxiety and depression, among local Dominican, Puerto Rican and African American youth populations.
Venkatesh acknowledges that a great deal of his time at Brown has been spent conducting research, but he still finds time to participate in the Meiklejohn program, for which he has served on the steering committee for the past three years. He has also worked as editor for both Visions, an Asian-American Journal, and the Brown Classical Journal.
In addition, Venkatesh loves hiking and has visited over 70 national parks in the United States. and Canada. Matt Gutheit '06, who roomed with Venkatesh for their first three years at Brown, added that his friend enjoys cooking Indian food but has "his own customized version of it," Gutheit said, involving a tremendous amount of spiciness.
As friend and former roommate Chris Hu '06 said, Venkatesh also spares time for an activity not unrelated to the interviews he conducts as part of his fieldwork.
"He loves gossiping," Hu said. "He, Matt (Gutheit) and I have this kind of institutionalized practice of getting together and gossiping."
Professor of Anthropology Lina Fruzzetti agreed that Venkatesh is "a talker," but added that this allows him to interact with groups beyond his own academic field or ethnic community. Fruzzetti said when Venkatesh first approached her as a first year, she mistook him for a graduate student because of the difficult texts he chose to read in his free time and because of "the way his mind works," Fruzzetti said.
Patricia Symonds, an adjunct associate professor of anthropology, praised Venkatesh as being "thoughtful and sensitive to people and so willing to be there. He has a desire to make a difference."
Indeed, making a difference is one of Venkatesh's driving motivations for his research, which he hopes to continue alongside a career as a clinical physician once his time at Brown is through.
"What you realize through research is what a humbling experience it is," Venkatesh said. "In the end, the question for me is, what is the social relevance of this and what are you getting out of doing this? And for me, there always has to be a larger social reason."
