Great Thanksgiving Listen by Vivek Kudva

00:00 Hello. I am Yogish Hydra. I am in fourth grade at Fawa elementary. I am nine years old. What do you see as a family legacy.

00:11 Yogish I see our family legacy as one involving kindness, competence, happiness and peace. Kindness is very, very important, and it is something we do every day. And competence is something mom and I work at every day during our workday. And we try to get Yogish and you also learning very well every day. And through this all, we try to keep ourselves happy and stress the importance of being peaceful.

00:57 Question number two, where did you grow up and what was your childhood like?

01:03 I was born in a town called Mangalore in south India. My parents lived in Goa from the time I was about a few months old until I was four years old. I went to school in a town called Bangalore. And once I finished high school, I could enter medical school. So I completed medical school in the same town. And so for about 20 years, I did education in that town. My parents were very helpful and generous, and therefore my childhood was awesome.

01:47 Are you afraid? What frightens you?

01:50 I am afraid of the cruelty that I am seeing in many parts of the world daily. And what frightens me is that because of this cruelty, more and more people may have limited choices. I think it is very important for children of today to have very good choices going forward. So I hope many people in the world will work towards decreasing cruelty, increasing kindness, and increasing choice. For young people like you, what has.

02:26 Given you hope and comfort?

02:31 I have had hope and comfort from the many, many generous people in the world who very courageously are working towards increasing kindness, increasing peace, decreasing cruelty, and increasing choice.

02:48 Tell me about one of the most important people in your life.

02:53 The most important person in my life is my wife, Shamila Bhatt. She is an information technology professional working at Mayo Clinic, Rochester. We have been married for 17 years, and we continue to be very happy and to complement each other every day.

03:19 How did you find your way to your current job?

03:24 I was very happy. I was very lucky that throughout school and also through medical school, I had very good teachers and mentors, and an exceptional mentor I had. Medical school helped me plan my career. Fortunately for me, he's still here at Mayo Clinic, Rochester. He's a gastroenterologist, and he guided me until I came to the stage where I had to make a choice about which area I wanted to specialize in. And that is where I parted ways with him, and I became an endocrinologist.

04:08 What lessons has work taught you?

04:13 Work has taught me to be very humble about what I know and what I don't know. And being very humble means that every day I try and improve the health of patients with diabetes. And I have to do it with the help of a team. It's either a team in the clinic or a team in research.

04:40 Tell me about your wedding day. Did it go as you planned?

04:43 For the most part, the wedding day went as it planned. Your mom and I had a wedding ceremony in the morning, and then after lunch we had a break, and then after the break we had a dinner in the evening where we greeted many guests. It was on my way to this dinner that our car had a flat tire. And I was fortunate to have a chauffeur who fixed the tire and got me to the wedding on time. To the wedding reception on time. We had a hectic night because after we ate, we took the flight from India to England and we spent one week in England. The second thing that went wrong that day was that our flights got delayed, so we reached England 5 hours late.

05:37 How did you meet your spouse partner?

05:44 My mother and my partner's mother knew each other when they were younger. They had very little contact with each other when they were older. But then, fortunately for us, they came to know each other again later on in life, and it was then that they introduced us to each other.

06:09 Tell me about your parents.

06:13 My dad wanted to be an engineer, but unfortunately he ended up being a. Being a statistician. He did his best once he had his education to be involved in helping people with small businesses. And every day he brought great discipline to his work. He would wake up quite early and his day had a very committed structure to it. And that is what I have learned from him and tried to do every day of my working career. My mother wanted to be a doctor, but ended up being a biology teacher due to various reasons. Her students were lucky, and I was lucky too, to learn from her about how to learn and how to improve.