Being Everyone's Neighbor

He’s a lot like Mister Rogers. If you look beyond the mass of shoulder-length curls and the colorful hats, you’ll see that Krishnan N. Subrahmanian ’03 very much wants to welcome you to his neighborhood.

In fact, this gangly bundle of energy would like to welcome most everyone to his neighborhood, and it seems that people—from Harvard students in every possible social category to Teach for America recruiters—are happy to join.

On a recent walk to the Quad, loping along Garden Street with a navy blue jacket draped over his head, Krish pauses five times to catch up with friends. “South Africa!” he exclaims to one, breaking out in a grin when he confirms they’ll both be there next year.

Six more friends approach him during lunch in Currier House. Krish has greeted 11 friends in the space of an hour, or nearly one every five minutes.

But these interludes aren’t just meet-and-greets for the popularly elected mayor of the Class of 2003.

“He genuinely is as nice as he comes across to everyone, which I think is pretty rare,” says his best friend Deirdre A. Colgan ‘03. “He’s not one of those people that will see you in the hall and say ‘hi,’ and keep on walking—he definitely wants to stop and talk and know how you’re doing.”

Indeed, Colgan adds that the first class marshal’s desire to connect with those in his community is so sincere that it can put a damper on her social life.

“From my perspective, it kind of sucks because it takes forever to go anywhere with him,” she says.

But to Krish, who talks often of “community” and “love,” taking time out for individuals represents the core of a personal philosophy that has crystallized over his college career.

His ideal community, and one he would like to see at Harvard, he says, is one where people would feel “safe, respected and loved at all times,” along the lines of the rules at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Connecticut, where he has spent the past two summers caring for seriously ill children.

“As much as this is a wonderful place to learn, it’s a place also where you live,” Krish says. “And it’s really important to make sure that people are part of a community or at least have a positive atmosphere to be in, and I think people have power in making that atmosphere a reality.”

Finding His Way

K.P. and Indira Subrahmanian raised Krish and his older sister, Chitra, near St. Paul, Minn., where they settled after emigrating from India in 1974. His father is a chemist at 3M and his mother, a diminutive bank teller who can just barely peek over the window. Both are “ridiculously supportive,” he says.

His small size necessitated a sort of reinvention in high school. Krish had been an athlete while growing up, but he turned to theater and mock trial when he realized he would not make the baseball and basketball teams his sophomore year.

He continued to pursue his dramatic bent once he arrived in Cambridge.

Krish’s friends say he is virtually unchanged since his first year. A few pounds heavier, possibly. Bigger hair, most definitely. His once red-hot ambition to dance back-up for Britney has cooled and his choice of headwear become more daring. (The most infamous he favored for a spell was a trucker hat that declared, “I Love Intercourse”—picked up in Intercourse, Penn.)

In fact, for roommate Adam J. Hornstine ’03, a moment in freshman week captures who Krish has been throughout college. The second-floor Greenough gang had gone to dinner at Annenberg.

But, he recalls, “there were 10 seats and there were 11 of us. Everyone sat down and I was the odd man out, so he came and sat with me at another table. Yes, awww, isn’t Krish sweet? But that’s something I’ll always remember because, in a nugget, that’s what he’s about.”

But even as Krish has breakdanced with a crew in the Square, stolen the limelight at the B.J. show, sparred verbally with Jackie Chan at Cultural Rhythms and reigned over his House as Miss Pfoho, he has found the time to learn more about the person he is becoming.

For the first time, he has developed a positive sense of what it means to be Indian. It’s not that he ever felt ashamed of his ethnicity, he says, but growing up in an area where most of his peers were Scandinavian Lutherans made it difficult for him to appreciate his difference.

Meeting larger numbers of South Asian students at Harvard has made him value his heritage more highly. South Asian theater was part of that awakening, Krish says, but his experience with the Gunghroo dance troupe was more influential.

“Gunghroo brings together a lot of people and I think it brings together people in a very organic way, for a purpose,” he says. “It’s not like I have to meet people just because they’re Indian, but we’re connecting about our Indianness or our Indian heritage over this art, and that’s really powerful.”

Krish has also broadened his definition of success. When he first came to Harvard, he was “pretty much set on getting a good job or going to the best graduate school possible.” Now, though, his priorities have become much more centered around social justice and personal relationships.

He has built some of his closest relationships with the Hole in the Wall Gang.

After interning for Minnesota’s then-Governor Jesse Ventura and delivering pizzas the summer after his first year, Krish became involved with the camp after hearing about it from a former participant who’s now at Harvard.

Founded by Paul Newman in 1988, the non-profit camp in northeastern Connecticut hosts for free each summer more than 1,000 children who have cancer and other life-threatening diseases such as sickle cell anemia, leukemia and HIV.

Krish has spent the past two summers there—this summer will make three—as a cabin counselor and member of the theater staff, doing everything from teaching the campers improv to making sure they get their medication.

“Experiences at camp have taught me that good relationships with people, that compassion and relationships, are probably the most important thing,” he says. “And that’s a really, profoundly different view than I came in with.”

He has brought this philosophy to bear on his extracurriculars. He’s spent countless hours teaching public school children to dance as the executive producer and director of City Step, which says giving students the means of self-expression helps improve their self-confidence.

He founded the advocacy group Cambridge Student Partnership, which connects unemployed, homeless people in Cambridge with community resources. He has overseen its growth from “five students around a table” his sophomore year to a staff of more than 20 that works out of two offices in Central Square and assists 55 clients a year.

He’s also raised $25,000 to fund his Habitat for Humanity team’s work-trip to East Demararra, Guyana, and built homes for inner-city communities in Boston, Norristown, N.J. and Germantown, Penn.

During the school year and even during breaks, his activities have taken him nearly everywhere except his room.

“We had a double sophomore year and I always bragged that I had the largest single on campus,” Hornstine says. “He was always waking up at six in the morning to do City Step, coming home at three in the morning after a long day of play rehearsal or whatnot.”

Krish’s focus on the connections between people extends beyond his extracurriculars to his academics—and to his appearance. His unconventional social studies thesis focused on how the clowns at Children’s Hospital Boston bring joy and laughter to a normally sterile environment. And he hopes his curls will someday soon make a fine wig for a child with cancer.

Krish will spend next year in Durban, South Africa, on a $25,000 Richardson Fellowship in public service to start up a camp based on the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp’s mission of providing a place for seriously ill children. The difference is that in South Africa, orphans, street children and children with HIV will comprise a significantly higher proportion of the campers.

After that, he may work with Teach for America, which offered him a position, but he also wants to finish his pre-med requirements. He’s still figuring things out, he says.

But his friends say they’ve figured out at least a few things.

“He’s one of those people who I feel like is going to end up famous for some reason some day,” Colgan says. “He’s just such an exuberant personality who wants to touch as many people as he can in his life that, somehow, he’s just going to end up in a prominent position.”

And he will still be welcoming one and all to his neighborhood.

—Staff writer Juliet J. Chung can be reached at juliet_chung@post.harvard.edu.