Manhattan University Professor Grishma Shah debuts novel inspired by global experiences

The director of global business studies and management professor at Manhattan University is moonlighting as a storyteller.

Grishma Shah just released her first novel, Anagram Destiny, and she wants the world to know a good story works just as hard as a classroom. 

The book was published by Spark Press and Simon & Schuster on Sept. 3, and Shah is excited for readers to experience the pieces of her woven into the literature. 

Shah’s life was entirely changed after a trip to Honduras when she was 16 that left her upset with the state of the world beyond her home. From that moment forward, she said, she spent her life studying international development and relations. 

In her classroom, she teaches her students about globalization and business around the world, especially how business is done in the global south. 

“One of the greatest joys of my job is getting to be in the classroom and I get to bring my classroom abroad every year,” Shah said. “I take students to a different country and we learn about doing business in that country.” 

Her family immigrated from India when she was just 7, but Shah has ventured back to her native country many times since, both with her family and her classroom. 

Shah’s book is split, with half of the story taking place in Mumbai, India, and the other half — inspired by her upbringing — being told from a roadside motel in the United States.

After moving to the country in the 80s with her family, they lived in roadside motels in the south for many years. She said it’s common for Punjabi families — from the Punjab region in India and Pakistan — like her own to live and work in motels. Typically, one family purchases the motel and then helps establish the rest of their community by providing a place to work to get people on their feet before they purchase their own motel. 

Currently, roughly 60 to 70 percent of small and medium-sized motels across the country are owned by a Punjabi family, according to Shah. 

Traveling back and forth to India, and even living abroad in Delhi during her college years, allowed Shah to watch the growth of the country over nearly two decades as the nation and it’s people changed their values and belief systems, and adjusted to a new culture. 

Shah describes her book as a dual-time love story, with the two times being split between vastly different countries. Her own experience shaped the book’s characters, and she describes the motel itself as having an identity, symbolizing inclusivity and aspiration.

The “rise of India” as she refers to it, is portrayed in the book at the same time as the family in her story pursues its own American dream.

While her journey as a writer is new, Shah has been a storyteller in her classroom for years. Teaching at Manhattan University for the last 16 years has taught her students are rarely drawn to teaching elements like numbers, graphs or data, but relate to stories, rich with details, that inform on the same material. 

She often starts the year with her students out with an exercise asking them to identify all the words they know in English that mean love. Students typically come up with around 10 words. Then Shah adds she speaks both Punjabi and Hindi, and they have at least 70 different words for love.

The emphasis in the exercise is not about love as much as it centers around language and how understanding the language of a culture brings an understanding of what that culture values. 

“If you’re going to do anything in terms of marketing or sales, you’re going to have either have to know that language or understand how that language works,” Shah said.

During the exercise, Shah explains the way to say “I love you, mom” is different than the way you say “I love you, brother” but the countless ways to say love are indicative of the fact that relationships are important in the Punjabi and Hindi cultures. 

Her classroom is full of bilingual students who add their own perspectives on their native languages and how words matter in their culture. 

Shah uses the methodology of storytelling in her classroom because she finds it gets the point across to her students faster than any statistics on how language is disappearing from the world and why it is of such importance to keep it alive. 

“All I really need them to understand is trends and what’s important,” Shah said. 

Teaching them things like the percentage of people speaking Swahili in the east of Africa does not matter as much to her because they can just as easily search the statistic up, and it is bound to change over time, but the importance of language and understanding how it affects relationships informs her students on how to tackle business abroad. 

Shah’s teaching pedagogy was the first step in the creation of her novel, basing her writing on her upbringing and her time spent in her classroom.