Indo American News Radio Houston TX · Indo American News Radio

IANR 2229 071622 Serial Entrepreneur Ashok Rao; Sri Lanka crisis with George Willy; DAV Montessori School with Geeta & Jasmine Kadakia

April 5, 2026·1 hr 54 min·9 clips

Ashok Rao admits he 'invented direct mail' by stealing phone book pages to target victims of burglaries for alarm sales.

1. Indo-American News Radio episode 2229 is a two-hour Saturday talk show on Masala 98.7 FM in Houston, hosted by Sanchali, Pramod Kulkarni, and Jyoti, with regular host Jawahar absent on a Vermont work trip. 2. Pramod Kulkarni handles the news roundup; Jyoti opens with a Guru Purnima classical music segment featuring her teacher Shruti Sample, who discusses ragas including Raghmarva and Sohani. 3. The show's core thesis is providing the Indo-American community in Houston with news from India, the US, and around the world alongside local community features and guest interviews. 4. The news roundup reports that India is on track to surpass China as the world's most populous country in 2023, with each country currently at over 1.4 billion people — shifting from 'every sixth person is Indian' to 'every fifth person.' 5. Sri Lanka's president Gotabaya Rajapaksa has fled to Singapore after massive public protests, is seeking UAE refuge, and parliament has convened to elect a new president while the government bars the Rajapaksa clan from leaving. 6. US inflation has reached 9.1%, regular gasoline dropped just below $4 per gallon, mortgage interest rates climbed to 5.5%, and the Federal Reserve is expected to raise rates further; the US dollar is at its strongest value in a generation. 7. President Biden is in Saudi Arabia meeting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to seek help stabilizing global energy markets; West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin has rejected the Biden administration's climate and energy investment plan as inflationary. 8. COVID BA.5 variant is driving a 14% increase in US cases to 130,000 per day; Sydney University researchers have reportedly developed a universal COVID vaccine requiring one jab every two years for all variants, pending human trials. 9. A Gujarat crime gang staged fake IPL cricket matches using local laborers on YouTube to defraud Russian gamblers, with earpieces visible giving instructions to bowlers in muddy fields with no grass. 10. Ashok Rao, the episode's main studio guest, grew up across nine cities in India and Europe as the son of an Indian Army doctor-general, attended IIT Delhi, and arrived in the US in 1970 at Marquette University in Milwaukee. 11. He describes inventing direct mail before the concept existed: tearing phone-booth white pages after burglary reports, hand-writing envelopes, and sending cyclostyle letters to neighbors — making him ADT's national salesman of the year out of 700 reps in his first year and earning his green card. 12. He founded Mitcom Communications in 1990, grew it to $250 million in annual revenue, and completed a NASDAQ IPO in July 1995 — only learning he was the first Indian-American to achieve this when a magazine profiling Southeast Asian Americans contacted him. 13. After selling Mitcom to a buyer he describes as now defunct, Ashok joined Enron as president of North American operations in 1996, leaving in 1997 before the scandal; he describes Ken Lay as approachable and grandfatherly and states on air that Jeff Skilling deserved his prison sentence. 14. Post-Enron, he founded Trex Communications in satellite communications, sold it in two and a half years to L3, a major defense manufacturer, then spent time as a free agent before moving into film production in 2004. 15. Ashok produced four feature films — My Far Away Bride, The Whisperers, Before the Rains, and The Lost Tribe — plus a documentary called Pocket Full of Soul about the harmonica's impact on soul and blues music; My Far Away Bride released in 30 countries. 16. He describes Before the Rains as set in Gandhi's colonial-era India, for which he rewrote the final five minutes of the Hollywood script to give it what he calls a more Gandhian ending. 17. The episode's format is a live radio talk show with commercial breaks, call-in listener interaction, studio guests, and phone-in guests — a community radio format aimed at Houston's South Asian diaspora. 18. The tone is warm and conversational, with hosts frequently joking, interrupting, and sharing personal anecdotes; Ashok matches the energy with wordplay and self-deprecating humor. 19. Indo-American community members in Houston interested in local news, South Asian diaspora entrepreneurship stories, and Indian classical music and culture will find this show familiar and relevant. 20. Listeners outside Houston's South Asian community looking for polished audio production, topical depth on any single subject, or structured interviews will find this format too sprawling.

As heard by us

A warm, loose community hour that leans on conversation, memory, and shared context over polish.

This hour is at its strongest when it settles into an easy, lived-in flow. It moves from birthday banter and a host away on work assignment in Vermont into music, family milestones, stage performances, a documentary mention, and a few local updates, with names and small…

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Why you'd press play

For a Houston community hour that drifts from birthday banter to family stories, music memories, and local chatter.

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