A life in public service was a foregone conclusion for Kishan Putta. But knowing what public to serve and what issues to tackle took some years of discernment. First finding his niche in health care policy and then in micro-local politics, he arrived at the sweet spot. Find out how putting yourself out there and figuring out what your neighbors need is at the core of being useful.
Guest Kishan Putta—who boldly introduced himself to everyone the first week of college as Kishan, like fishin’—always knew a life of public service would suit him. His parents both immigrants from small villages in India, worked for the state of New York, his mother in biology and his father as an engineer in environmental issues. To Kishan it just made sense to want to give back. But he was unsure the type of service that he would want to do and on what scale.
His first step to figuring that out was through graduate school at Harvard’s Kennedy School and, though getting the broad survey he knew would be helpful he took another path to international service. After getting the opportunity to travel abroad to both India and Chile to write travel guidebooks, he turned to political journalism for a number of global publications. Eventually he landed in Washington, DC. When he started covering health care policy, he knew he’d found his niche.
After a number of years working on the outside looking into a policy issue, he decided he wanted to work on the issue itself and took a few routes to do that before working on the policy side. In the meantime, he realized that his life in D.C. also afforded him the opportunity to take part in local service and found himself on local ballots more than once.
In this episode, find out from Kishan how putting yourself out there and figuring out what your neighbors need is at the core of being useful…on ROADS TAKEN...with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode's Guest
Kishan Putta has worked for over a decade in healthcare policy in Washington D.C., where he also has served in elected office, representing two different neighborhood wards as commissioner. He currently lives in the Burleith/Georgetown neighborhood of D.C. with his wife and young son. You can find him on Twitter @KishanForDC. (319)
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Kishan Putta: I think if anything, college and grad school just taught me that if you put yourself out there and meet people, at least for myself, you put yourself, if I put myself out there and meet people, opportunities will present themselves.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: A life in public service was a foregone conclusion for Kishan Putta, but knowing what public to serve and what issues to tackle took some years of discernment. First finding his niche in healthcare policy and then in micro-local politics, he arrived at the sweet spot. Find out how putting yourself out there and figuring out what your neighbors need is at the core of being useful…on today's Roads Taken with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
I'm here today with a much-anticipated Kishan Putta, and we are going to talk about putting yourself out there and seeing what comes, so welcome Kishan.
KP: Thank you, Leslie. It's so great to see you and to hear you and to talk to you again, after so many years.
LJR: Yes. Yes. And I am certain that almost everyone knows you or of you in our class, but I am going to still ask the same question. I ask everyone set of questions and they are these: when we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
KP: Hm. When we were in college, I was someone who wanted to meet everyone and learn from everyone. And being at a small rural campus was really perfect for that. I think I spent more time socializing than studying, but that is what was driving me and the people I learned a lot from the people.
LJR: Hey, Kishan, can I interrupt you? I don't think I met you this way, so I'm not sure if it's an apocryphal story or not, but did you go around freshmen week introducing yourself as “Kishan Like Fishin’?”
KP: Yeah.
LJR: You did.
KP: Nobody ever forgot that, actually.
LJR: I don't think I got to experience it firsthand, but I certainly had heard like, oh, who's that? Oh, that's Kishan Like Fishin’.
KP: Yeah. Yeah. That is a true story. Yeah. Kishan rhymes with fishin’; Kishan like fishin’. Yeah. Yeah. I wanted people to say it right. And I thought of it and it actually was a pretty good ice breaker.
LJR: For sure. Memorable.
KP: It was weird, but most people thought it was funny and those were the good old days. Yeah, and that is who I was when I entered college. And through college, I learned that I didn't need to try as hard to make friends as when I first started, I felt like I needed to try really hard, but towards the end I began to feel like people would be able to see me instead of me trying to show everyone who I was. So that is something I learned.
And your second question was when I left, who did I think I would become, right? I don't know. I did know my next step was graduate school. I had a…I never really wavered from a high school ambition of public service. And I didn't know what form of public service that would take. I didn't know what field I wanted to serve in. I didn't know whether it would be international or national or federal, but in fact, after many years here in Washington, DC, I'm doing neither. I am still doing public service. I had not thought that I would end up doing local and that is what I'm primarily doing now is municipal for the great city, the District of Columbia.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. And we'll definitely get into that. I'm just curious where that interest in public servant life came from. Was that instilled by your parents or some other examples in your past?
KP: You know, I wouldn't say that came from my parents. I don't know if how I, if I would have come to it without any influence from my parents, but I was drawn to current events and public policy and the law from a fairly young age. So it's a chicken and egg, right? I think my parents saw that interest and did foster it with news clippings and, and encouraging me to do other things. But, yeah. In fact, when I was little, those were not the things that they were pushing most…but yeah, public speaking…My parents are both immigrants from India, from small villages in India. My father worked really hard. He was an engineer and I always thought of him as a science guy first but only after a while, after I began my career, did I start to really remember that, in fact, his career was spent in public service. He was an engineer for the state of New York, and we grew up in Albany, in the capital. Even my mom worked for the government in biology and my father environmental issues. And so it's funny sometimes you think of someone one way and then you realize actually he had a lot more in common with me than I thought. And Dartmouth had such a strong government program. I all, in fact, outside of class, all of the great speakers we had were encouraging me for more and more, but I just wanted to give back my parents did believe in giving back and in community service. And, you know, this country gave us, our family, so much. I've been wanting to give back. You know, we wouldn't have had half these opportunities anywhere else.
LJR: Kishan, with those great applied role models, you could have just kind of jumped into work life and that was that. But instead you went the grad school right away, route. How did you come to that decision and kind of, where did that lead? How did, how did that unfold for you?
KP: I guess, like I was saying, Leslie, there's lots of different paths to public service and between myself and my. And all of our friends here in Washington and elsewhere who work in public service my networks of, of colleagues in public service, I've heard many different paths and stories. I didn't know for sure what field I wanted to be in. And so I was looking forward to grad school, giving me an even sharper focus. I did think I was going to focus on international issues. And my favorite class at Dartmouth was IEP…international…IPE, international political economy. It was with a government professor a lot of classmates will remember, Michael Mastinduno in the government department. And it was a very popular class for a good reason. He just made it so fascinating. To put an economic lens on international relations, which usually you hear us from a security and military point of view because those are the hot issues, but the economics are just as important if not more important. And I did think I would focus on that in graduate school. And I did, I did, but I, I did take a lot of other classes across the Kennedy School of Government and the university. And so, yeah, but, but I did hope that I would get a keener focus. I was lucky enough to have funding for it as well. A fellowship I earned while I was in college. And those two points that drove me in that direction as much as I was a better person when I graduated from Dartmouth than when I was, when I, when I entered, I don't think I was really ready to enter the workforce right away. And I think my. Indeed we're spent you know, searching for what I wanted to do and what I was best at.
LJR: Right. So foreshadowing international actually was not the end thing. And you've already talked about how local you are. But was that first step after Harvard internationally focused? Or where did, where did your path take you?
KP: In fact, no, it wasn't. No, I, I think I got a really good education. Lots of different issues there. Yeah. When I left, it was not my, my was no longer my primary focus of what I wanted to do, but I, I did, I did want to explore the world and I did get that opportunity from grad school. I got two positions as a travel writer. I wrote two travel guides, one to India and one to Chile and I speak Spanish. And so that that was a great opportunity as well, to travel.
LJR: Very cool.
KP: Yeah. Yeah. I think if anything. And grad school just taught me that if you put yourself out there and meet people, at least for myself, if you prove yourself, if I put myself out there and meet people opportunities will present themselves. And in fact so I actually got really interested in journalism. After I, after being a travel writer, I wanted to focus on public service through journalism. I, as, as I mentioned, I was trying to figure out. What type of public service to do. And you know, I had all this experience with government and politics and I was thinking to myself, is that really all there is, or is there something else? And I had an interest in journalism from school newspapers at The Dartmouth and my high school newspaper. And so, yeah, I, and then after being a travel writer, I said, let me see what I, what influence I can have writing about government and politics and policy and what influence we can have from the outside. And that was good. A great experience as a journalist at many publications, both domestically and abroad. I was with the Times of India in Bangalore and The Straits Times newspaper in Singapore, and then domestically with the Providence Journal and the Los Angeles Times, before finally wanting to be a political reporter full-time in Washington. And so then I came to DC to focus on being a political reporter, but being a journalist was an invaluable experience, such great perspective from the outside, looking in; learning to communicate clearly with the average reader, complicated government policies and reports; drilling them down for, you know, not just your colleagues, but for everyday readers for them to understand, but them to be able to make sense of the world. That has been a very invaluable tool.
LJR: Continuing that theme from earlier, where you want to meet everyone and learn from them. You need to do that when you're crafting stories and…
KP: For sure. For sure. You can't not be a people person. If you're a reporter, especially a local reporter and they gave me license to just talk to anyone. And even as a political reporter, it gave me license to go up to powerful leaders and just ask them questions. And that was my job. And they were supposed to listen to me and answer my questions. And so that was I, that, that, that was a good fit. It was definitely a good fit journalism was a great experience. Eventually I decided that I found a field I loved, which was healthcare policy. I was writing about it. And I decided I finally found that field that I think is the, the one that I'm going to focus on. And let me, let me jump in and actually try to make the policies better.
LJR: Yeah. Instead of being in the outside, looking in. Yeah. Okay. So how, how does that happen? How do you say, oh, now I found it I'm going to go do it. Where do you find yourself?
KP: Yeah, actually, if you don't mind, Leslie, I will actually mention why I think health policy is so fascinating to me, at least of all the different fields and issues out there. The U.S. actually is doing it differently than other countries and not necessarily better, but because we're doing it differently, we have the opportunity to improve the most and to learn from our mistakes and to come up with perhaps an even better solution, eventually. We unfortunately spend so much money on healthcare. It is just an issue that is ripe for. Reform and obviously it just also very emotional and you can't get more vital to somebody then their health and their life, and life and death situations that they face on a day to day basis. And lastly because of all of that, it's also in America for those and other reasons so…healthcare policy is just about the most politically fraught. So I figured, let me take on the hardest and most important and most expensive issue we can take on because I thought to myself, I have a career in front of me. Maybe there's a chance that we can improve this.
Luckily as a political reporter. And any kind of any government reporter has really good contacts in the public sector, obviously. And it wasn't, well, it wasn't necessarily that hard because I was already here in DC. I had the contacts made up for as a journalist and I was young and I was willing to take anything. But interestingly enough, the first position wasn't in government, it was in the private sector, analyzing the government specifically analyzing health care policy for the private sector. So that was a, it was actually a good transition because industry knowledge is always really helpful for policymakers there's too many policymakers who speak about policy, not realizing the impact on the industry that actually carries it out on the hospital sector, on the physician sector, on the pharmaceutical sector, and you have to have that that understanding to make good policy. You have to know what's right and wrong, but you also have to know what the implications are going to be. To make the right policies, you know. You can, you know, you know, what side do you want to be on? That's fine. But what is this specific policy getting that industry? Otherwise, you're going to have to rely on the industry to tell you knowing it was helpful. And then, then I went to the Senate. In between I had another position, it was focusing on healthcare disparities. I was with a nonprofit as well on healthcare disparities for minority communities, which is also a great angle. Yeah. So I went from the corporate sector to that, to the nonprofit sector, to really round out my experience. Because again, you need to know what the implications are on the most vulnerable communities. And you can know that anecdotally and theoretically that the vulnerable communities aren't the ones lobbying Congress enough that, those everyday people aren't coming to Congress to tell you what it's going to mean for them. So to actually work on it, to meet those communities, to go out in those communities and learn what they really needed and didn't need from the government was helpful. I took all that and went to the Senate and then I think I had a really good, pretty good grounding on healthcare policy. That put it all together for me and then when the affordable care act and Obamacare was being debated, I went back to the private sector to make it work because it was focused on health insurance is big change in healthcare in America. Even though health insurance is kind of an arcane subject, that really was the, probably one of the biggest, if not the biggest thing that needed reform. There were way too many people, tens of millions of people in America without health insurance. And that doesn't happen in England and in Germany and in Spain; they have universal health insurance. You can find pros and cons to it, but we didn't even have the coverage here for tens of millions of people. And I was very proud to help implement the affordable care act at the federal level, through the insurance industry, and then really making it work at the state level. Obamacare is run by the states for the most part and DC, where I live, I watched it getting implemented and I wanted to help make an implement that here we are for all intents and purposes a state in terms of how we're run we just need to become …
LJR: We don’t have that yet right.
KP: …the 51st state. But we do our run, our own Obamacare system. It's called DC Health Link. And that's who I've worked for for the last eight years.
LJR: So really all these layers of the onion looking in from the outside, getting closer and closer to the real work and then doing that real work. Yeah. And s, Kishan, I know that that has been one aspect and a huge aspect of your public service, but there's this other that really speaks to the Kishan-puts-himself-out-there train of thought we've been going on and you decided to do what seems crazy to most people and put yourself really out there and run for office, elected office.
KP: Yes, that's right. That's right. Yeah. As I began to get involved locally, I realized there was another way to serve here and we're pretty well run city. And so there's actually an opportunity to really make progressive policies that change people's lives to be at the forefront of them, whether it's on a paid leave, et cetera. So many progressive politics. I've been either getting started in the District of Columbia or getting, you know, proven as proofs of concept here in the District of Columbia. So that was, that was definitely very encouraging. And I realized we also have a very local level of elected office here. They're called commissioners. And I thought to myself, why not? Why not run? And it, it was definitely a big step, but I do love meeting people and helping people. It was great to do it at the federal level and at the policy level, but I also wanted to help my local community. And there's many ways to do that. But DC offers this extra way of doing it, of running very, very locally. So I started to go out and ask people what they needed from their city, what they wanted. In fact, I heard one thing consistently. It was transportation at that time. People were having a lot of trouble getting to work or getting to school on the bus lines. And so I went out to the bus stops and started organizing. It took a lot of hard work. It took a long time to get press coverage, to get the government to take notice and to eventually make changes and improvements that helped a lot of people. But that experience, it only encouraged me. And I was very pleased to run for commissioner and win in a three-way race and my first race with a large margin.
And it gave me the confidence to keep pushing for improvements. And that was in one part of the city where I lived DuPont Circle. And now I live in another part of the city, the Berleith and Georgetown neighborhoods. And I, when I moved here with my wife, Her name is Divya and she's wonderful. And but she did not want to live in that condo anymore. So we got a house over here and I told her we can move, but I'm going to run again. But she also helped me very much. She's a great baker as well as a foreign policy expert. And so she baked hundreds of campaign cookies that I used when I went door to door campaigning with my newborn son, actually.
LJR: And that's how you wrap it up: The yum smell and the cute kid.
KP: Absolutely absolutely. In the baby Bjorn. And I was pleased to be reelected over in this new neighborhood as well. And I've been working on new issues not just transportation, but now education is another very important topic. Our city is great in so many ways, as I mentioned, but one thing that's holding us back from being even better. Our public school system, the quality is not even across our city and I want to help advocate for improvements. And that's especially with the little one coming up is three now in preschool. Will be entering the elementary school shortly before I know it. And so I wanted to, I get a head start on addressing education.
LJR: Yeah, well, that comes full circle because your earlier education had helped you get to all of these places. And when you think back to Kishan Like Fishin’, could that person have imagined where you are. Is this kind of what he had in the field of view or what would he say?
KP: It's a good question. I have not thought of it exactly like that, but I do from time to time, think of that person. That person in college did want to help people and did have an interest in running for office someday, to be honest. And in fact, I do recall freshman year running for class president, I did not win, which is okay, but did student government as well. And I did have that interest…someday. I didn't know when, I didn't know where I didn't know what, but I am glad that I was able to put myself out there to be given a chance to serve by my constituents and to help make my, my city and my neighborhood and my world a little better. And that was my goal. And still not done. I want to do a lot more in the coming years and, and my son is inspiring me to do that.
LJR: Well, you are inspiring, Kishan, for always being willing to take that risk and say hello and ask what people need and to try the best to fill it. You are indeed an inspiration and there's no one that I would want to have knock on my door and ask me what I need and give me cookies venue. So you're welcome any time. And it's been a delight. Thank you so much for sharing.
KP: Thank you Leslie.
LJR: That was Kishan Putta, who has worked for over a decade in healthcare policy in Washington D.C., where he also has served in elected office, representing two different neighborhood wards. He currently lives in the Burleith/Georgetown neighborhood of D.C. with his wife and young son. Though we can't promise to bring freshly baked cookies to your door, we do promise to serve up some delicious stories of more fascinating souls on this show. We so appreciate your listening and would love your help spreading the word. While our full archive of episodes, show notes and transcripts can be found at RoadsTakenShow.com, it's ever-so-helpful for you to follow, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts--where over half our listeners find us--or wherever you find your podcasts. With your help, more people we be able to gain, hearing from my guests and me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, on future episodes of Roads Taken.