The American Dream, in Overdrive

BRYAN THOMAS, FOR THE CHRONICLE

Earning an MBA. Working at a blue-chip consulting firm. Founding a financial advisory firm or a hedge fund. Donating big to a major institution. Any two or more of these achievements are common to the résumés of New York’s elite and famous philanthropists.

Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon have hit all those marks and then some, but they remained fairly unknown in Manhattan philanthropy circles until 2015, when they gave New York University’s engineering school, now named for them, $100 million and landed on the Chronicle’s Philanthropy 50 list of the top donors that year.

It was the Indian-American couple’s largest contribution to date, but the Tandons have been giving to charity for more than 15 years. In addition to their big gift to New York University, they’ve contributed at least $16 million to nonprofits through their Krishnamurthy Tandon Foundation, whose assets stand at over $19 million, according to tax filings. Today they focus their giving primarily on the arts, education, and programs that promote emotional well-being.

Theirs is a story of the American Dream in overdrive. They credit education and the opportunities they received in the United States as key to their success, and they are setting out to make sure others find success but also a peaceful, centered life.

Battling With Her Mother

Chandrika Tandon grew up in Chennai, India, graduated from Madras Christian College, and earned an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad — this despite her mother’s best efforts to marry her off. “I had to fight to go to college,” she says.

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She arrived in the United States in 1979, joining McKinsey & Company. A world of opportunity opened up for her. She had mentors who didn’t care where she came from; they only wanted to help her succeed. Later, she became the first Indian woman partner at the firm, and she eventually left to start her investment and consulting firm, Tandon Capital Associates.

Ranjan Tandon grew up in Delhi, India, and earned an engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He came to the United States with a scholarship and graduated in 1977 from Harvard Business School, where he says he was impressed and surprised to be easily accepted. After stints with Halliburton, Merrill Lynch, and others, he launched his hedge fund, Libra Advisors, in the early ’90s.

Along the way Chandrika and Ranjan met and married, had a daughter, and became U.S. citizens. When their wealth started to grow in the late 1990s and early 2000s, they began to give donations in the five- and six-figure range. Initially, they directed a lot of their charity to institutions in India.

“We were the people that came here and made good, and the dollar bought a lot in India, so we did lots of things with schools, with hunger, with communities,” says Chandrika.

They then started to give more to programs that help the U.S. Indian diaspora before turning their attention to education. “We’ve really got to be able to use education as a window to vault [people] into different realms,” says Chandrika. “That has certainly been true for us, and we’ve been given extraordinary opportunities.”

The NYU gift came about through Chandrika’s yearslong association with the university, first as an executive in residence at its Stern School of Business and later as a vice chairman of the university’s Board of Trustees.

Part of the Tandons’ gift will help the school raise an additional $50 million for scholarships. Many of NYU’s engineering students are first-generation Americans and the first in their families to attend university; they rely on financial aid to get them through.

“I’m an engineer by training and so my eyes light up when I see how hard these kids are working and all the opportunities they’ll have,” says Ranjan.

New Philanthropy Phase

The Tandons are moving into a new phase of philanthropy that stems from changes in their personal and professional lives.

Deep into their careers, both started to feel unbalanced. Ranjan says he went through a “troubled period” in his work, experiencing intense anxiety. He turned to daily meditation to overcome the stress and recalibrate how he coped.

“These practices teach you to be compassionate to yourself and others, and subsequently you look at the world with a very compassionate point of view,” he says. “It’s continuous work and very easy to regress, so its daily work, but I’m more intentionally aware now.”

Chandrika Tandon’s self-reckoning took a different turn. She realized about 18 years ago that while she had achieved material success, she questioned what made her happy, what mattered in life, and why she “was put on this planet.”

“I went into a very intensive exploration into why I was feeling this way, and that’s when I got back to music,” she says.

As Chandrika was growing up, music was a big part of her life. She was trained in Carnatic and Hindustani classical Indian music and in different forms of Western music. She sings, composes, and plays the guitar and the tanpura and veena, traditional Indian stringed instruments similar to a lute. She and her sister Indra Nooyi (who recently stepped down as CEO of PepsiCo) took lessons, and everyone in the family sang. Music fell aside as her business career took off, but during that period of questioning, she returned to it.

Today she has made three records, performed worldwide, and was nominated for a Grammy for her self-produced 2010 album “Soul Call,” which mixes classical Indian chants with contemporary and traditional Indian music. The money she raises through her music goes to arts and education groups and charities that help women in India and the United States through a nonprofit she started called Soul Chants Music.

“The entire music career that I developed wasn’t really intended to be a career. It was just one of the tools I used that led me into an introspective thought, which was about well-being,” she says. “It changed the prism through which I viewed the entire universe of what I do and how I view people.”

The Tandons say while they remain focused on backing education, they are hoping that the philanthropy they are turning to today — donating to efforts that provide free meditation programs, yoga, tai chi, and other practices focused on well-being — will enable them to find ways to give big to programs that cohesively combine the arts, education, and well-being.

“We are custodians for this wealth for a very short period of time, and it’s the smallest thing we can do to give contributions back,” says Chandrika Tandon. “This is our country and our home, so the contributions from people like us and people who have been here for generations are all contributing to the rich mosaic that is the great heritage of this country.”