Parul Kapur Hinzen's Page

In reflecting on the life of my beloved father, Jatinder Nath Kapur, who passed away recently at age seventy-five, I decided to post excerpts of his memoir, which begins with his immigration to America. The decision to leave India was the most momentous of his life. My father had never seen the world outside India until the day he left for good in 1969. Below is his account of his voyage out at the age of thirty-five. My father loved parties, drinking Scotch and having a good time, so it's natur… Continue

My father began writing his memoirs at my urging the summer before he turned seventy in 2003. He was, as I said in my earlier post, an engaging raconteur and I hoped he would preserve his stories in his own words without any intervention by me. He wrote four chapters before he strayed from the project, and they are a precise and picturesque portrait of his life in India. At some point he mailed these chapters to me, asking me to serve as his editor. I thought they were vividly written and though… Continue

My father was a wonderful raconteur with an amazing recall of detail and atmosphere. His India is the India I know best, although I lived there till the age of eight and have been back to visit many times. My father, Jatinder Nath Kapur, was an executive in the limestone quarries in Orissa and then an oil executive in the jungles of Assam in the '50s and early '60s. His stories of the British-style social life in these remote outposts, the tense relationships between executives and labor, the hi… Continue