How San Francisco can write a new love story

With the right heart, it can find ways to nurture the homeless and give them a sense of belonging

San Francisco is a beautiful city, inhabited by incredible people who really do believe in doing good things (Source: Suvir Saran)

Written by: Suvir Saran

6 min readFeb 13, 2022 06:10 AM IST First published on: Feb 13, 2022 at 06:10 AM IST

Every year, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and The Culinary Institute of America hold an annual conference in beautiful Napa Valley called Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives. Conference attendees are immersed in a world of cutting-edge nutrition science in addition to practical and chef-driven techniques. They learn and teach others to enjoy a broad selection of foods that can reduce disease risk and, ideally, replace unhealthy habits of a lifetime. The goal of the conference is to transform attendees into advocates and role models for healthy foods and lifestyle choices. It is to this inspiring annual retreat, where I have been presenting for 18 years, that I go most happily, despite the pandemic, and keep my connection to the San Francisco Bay Area and Napa Valley alive.

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Just as we need to be mindful in our choices and lifestyles in the culinary world, we must be mindful in politics and governance, too. We must think beyond ourselves, beyond our comfort, and beyond our own time frames. We must think of life in a more holistic fashion. At the conference this week I looked at San Francisco from that place, and I realised that much has to be done.

My maternal grandparents had three children abroad and one child in India, so post-retirement they began spending more and more time in San Francisco. Nani looked at this not as something to bring her down but rather to lift her up. She learned to do new tricks as she set up home in the US. She cooked, cleaned and enjoyed the company of her grandchildren. She took care of herself and her husband, learnt new cooking techniques, new ways of baking, new recipes for salads and sandwiches and corn bread. My grandfather would read The New York Times; Nani would read it too, but then she would look for the food section and learn new recipes from it. She taught herself how to live in a new land, how to embrace it and learn from it.

San Francisco has this same opportunity – to not be lost in gloom, but rather to see its challenges as opportunities that keep it alive, thinking, reasoning and challenging itself. And by doing so, grow to become better, more inclusive, more thoughtful, more welcoming, more exciting, more adventurous, and a place for all who come and make it their home.

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San Francisco’s challenge is homelessness. They can’t hide it or hide from it. The homeless don’t want to move to new neighbourhoods that the mayor and the city have found for them. They want to be in the city where they have learnt to cope and survive.

Every one of those homeless souls speaks of the smallness of their fellow man’s minds and hearts. Their untold stories are those of neighbours cozied up inside homes. Each street in those corners deemed too lonely to walk at night is telling the story that the fog might hide but is all too clearly seen by eyes open and minds thinking with intelligence.

This is an area that houses Twitter, Google and Facebook. There are technology giants all around San Francisco. These are people who can get together and come up with a smart way of dealing with the issue of homelessness, but no one has the will.

Nani suffered a stroke in her later years and through physical therapy learned to move again, using a walker. Instead of mourning her limitations, she had her walker fitted with a tray that she would use as a chopping board. She would sit and chop vegetables and then, using her walker, take them to the kitchen for cooking. She made three meals every day for herself, my grandfather and for guests who stopped by.

San Francisco is a beautiful city, inhabited by incredible people who really do believe in doing good things. It is now time for that city and its citizens and its government to come together and create a “walker” that not only helps them do what needs to be done, but that also has the world looking at them and say, “Wow, if they can do it, so can we.”

American author Armistead Maupin wrote the book series called Tales of the City, from 1978 to 2014. The stories revolve around a landlady, Anna Madrigal, who has a deep, dark secret. But this does not keep her from being a magical woman, a gracious host, and the most nurturing of elders to her tenants.

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San Francisco is Anna Madrigal. Her challenges should not keep her from being a nurturing landlady to all her residents. It is time for San Francisco to wake up and use the amazing talent it has and find a solution and give the world a way of making homelessness a thing of the past –

to nurture her residents and give each one a sense of belonging.

San Francisco is sterling in its reputation and brightly civil at its core. It might be lost, but misguided it is not. It has taken some wrong turns in its path to greatness, but it is inching forward towards a tomorrow that it wants to make better for all. San Francisco has the right heart, mind, and soul. It only needs to own itself and appreciate its reality. Its struggles are of its own making and its solutions, too, will come from within itself. It must make its love story one that brings pleasure and nirvana for all that call it home.