On the 74th Independence Day of India, the vice-presidential candidate from the Democratic Party, Kamala Harris recalled her childhood memories and mentioned the attempts of her South Indian mother to instil a love for good ‘idli’ in her and her sister Maya and recalled the “long walks” in the present Chennai with her grandfather.
Kamala Devi Harris is a politician and lawyer based in the U.S. who has served as the junior senator in the United States from California since 2017. She was the 32nd Attorney General of California and 27th District Attorney of San Francisco. Her father, Donald Jasper Harris is a professor and a Jamaican- American economist while her mother, Shyamala Gopalan was a biological researcher in the U.S. and born in the Madras province of British India.
At an event by the “South Asians of Biden”, Harris extended her wishes on Independence Day and spoke about how the American and Indian communities are bound together by so much more than the shared history and culture. Narrating how her mother stepped on American soil when she was 19, Harris recalls that her mother didn’t have many material belongings but carried with her the “lessons from home, including ones she’d learned from her parents.”
She and her sister were taken to India by her mother, a leading cancer researcher and activist, as she wanted her daughters to understand her origin and its culture. Harris remembers how she used to undertake long walks in the then Madras with her grandfather who narrated to her, stories of “heroes” involved in making India, independent. She said that the reason behind her being there was the lessons that her grandfather P. V. Gopalan, an Indian civil servant, had given her.
Kamala Harris had started her career at the District Attorney office of the Alameda County. She was later recruited to the District Attorney’s Office and later the City Attorney’s office of San Francisco. She was elected the district attorney of San Francisco in 2003 and the attorney general of California in 2010 and 2014. She became the first South Asian American and the second female African- American to serve in the U.S. senate. She had supported the federal rescheduling of cannabis, the DREAM Act, a ban on potential assault weapons, healthcare form, the path to obtaining citizenship by undocumented migrants etc. as a senator. Harris gained a national profile after questioning the officials of Trump administration during the Senate hearings.
The National Black Prosecutors Association awarded the Thurgood Marshall Award in 2005 to Harris and in the same year, she was featured in the Newsweek report that profiled “20 of America’s Most Powerful Women” along with 19 others. Harris also gained significant national attention when she ran for the Democratic Presidential Elections of 2020 and ended her campaign in December 2019. The presumed Presidential candidate from the Democratic Party, Joe Biden, announced Kamala Harris to be his running mate for the upcoming presidential elections. They are being considered to be the ideal ticket to defeat Trump and Pence.
