Parvinder Singh Jandu

Profession: Dentist (practicing for the past four decades)

Business: Co- owns Haandi, an Indian restaurant with 3 branches in Kenya. established in 1991

Citizen: Kenyan

His maternal grandfather came to work in a sawmill in 1898 upon the invitation of an Englishman and soon set his business here. “This is home,” says Dr Parvin Singh Jandu, a third generation Kenyan, a successful Dental practitioner and a restaurateur.

While completing his dentistry in Bombay, though India fascinated him, the inclination to return to Kenya was always high.

No doubt he found Indians extremely friendly, the level of social segregation, which was nowhere evident amongst Indians residing in Kenya, shocked him and came as a stark revelation. But the divide between the haves and have not’s in Kenya is something he is quick to acknowledge.

Cases of Kenyan Indians being kidnapped, shot, robbed and burgled in Nairobi often make headlines. Dr Jandu is quick to retort, “People are targeted not because they are Indians but because they are rich. How many Africans have been killed? Do you know?,” he asks. “It’s being at the wrong place at the wrong time. My wife got pick pocketed even in central London,” he explains. Though he agrees that the security is a bit on the shabbier side, “we are still living here and doing business. It has never bothered us enough to say, we have to go, this is home ” he reiterates.

But one epidemic, which is gnawing many African countries and medical practitioners especially, is the number of people affected with HIV. Kenya has the joint fourth-largest HIV epidemic in the world (alongside Mozambique and Uganda) in terms of the number of people living with HIV. “As doctors we can’t discriminate our patients. We do take extra precautions like using double gloves especially in our dental camps in Makindu, which is a lot poorer community and sterilizing our dental equipment, ” says Dr Jandu who feels worrying about it is totally uncalled for.

When not diagnosing the oral health of his patients he is busy raising the bar of contemporary Indian cuisine. Running an Indian restaurant here the only major hurdle he faces is getting good staff to make tasty food, “No matter how much you train your local staff or the Indian staff to cook –  it’s never like your mothers,” he says laughingly.