“My dream is to see this all running without my help, so I can pass away peacefully, knowing that I created something and gave something back,” he said.

About 20 to 25 years ago, Bahuleyan returned to Chemmanakary and was struck by how little it had changed. “Not a road, no school, water supply or sanitary facilities,” he said. “I saw the same people living in the same miserable conditions that I had grown up with.” Bahuleyan says, he is still haunted by the cries of his siblings, all under 8 years, who died of roundworm infection in the 1930s, after drinking polluted water.

As an “untouchable,” Bahuleyan had to take a roundabout route to school because he wasn’t allowed to pass within a few hundred yards of the Hindu temple. He attended a lower-caste school passing it at the age of 12 or 13. After attending a premedical school, Bahuleyan joined the medical college in Madras.

The local Government in Kerala sent him for neurosurgical training to Edinburgh, Scotland,where he spent six years before returning home. But here he could not get a job in his speciality. “They didn’t know what to do with me. Many people didn’t know what neurosurgery was,” he said. So he went to Kingston, Ontario, then Albany Medical College, before coming to Buffalo.

Bahuleyan now plans to set up a new East India Seven Seas Sailing Company near the Arabian Sea. Early this summer, he spent 50 hours a week preparing at Zimmermann’s Seven Seas Sailing School, located on the Buffalo ship canal. Four sailboats are being shipped to India next month. The school plans to receive couples willing to spend a few weeks in India, to volunteer in Bahuleyan’s hospital and to teach sailing. PTI