“A room without books is like a body without a soul.” — Cicero
If you haven’t been yet, there’s a lovely little spot just a half-block from William Way LGBT Community Center that has both books and soul. It’s called Writer’s Block Rehab and no, it’s not a recovery facility: It’s a lovely little bar opened up by this week’s Portrait, Ram Krishnan.
PGN: So I‘ve read your bio and, among other things, you have been a world-travel consultant, industrial engineer, mural purveyor, engineer, IT consultant and bar owner. Mr. Krishnan, who are you?
RK: [Laughs] I’m Ram Krishnan and I came here from India to pursue my MBA at Drexel. I work at Comcast now as a systems architect but over the years I’ve mostly worked as an IT consultant all around the world. As I was influenced by different parts of the world, I always brought back a little piece to Philadelphia so the mural love is because of Philadelphia; I had a large mural of Nelson Mandela painted on the side of my house. The food and cocktail love is from traveling to so many different countries. Who I am is a combination of many things from around the world but Philly is home.
PGN: Where are you originally from?
RK: South of India, in Bangalore. It’s a big IT capital now but when I left India it was the Garden City. Just the most beautiful city, very laidback and relaxed. People had a love for life, but it’s a completely different city now; I barely recognize it.
PGN: Describe your family.
RK: I have an older sister in Houston with two little boys; I guess not so little now because the oldest is going to college. My parents still live in India but they come a lot to the U.S. A lot of my cousins live in the U.S. too.
PGN: What did your parents do?
RK: My dad did manufacturing engineering, much like I did in India. He helped run a bunch of factories and these days he writes books about optimization and quality control and zero waste. He’s very much into that ideology. My mother was a homemaker and had a daycare at home so I grew up around a lot of kids all the time. Hence, no kids. No, I’m just kidding. I love kids.
PGN: Did all those kids make you a people person?
RK: No, growing up I was a very introverted child. I was definitely not a social butterfly. I was very awkward except around my friends; with them I was a strong leader. I had a little gang and we’d climb trees and get into mischief. But when I went to Drexel I began to open up; school gave me my identity in many ways. In India, it’s very hard to have your own point of view — it’s very much a collective there; you’re part of the community and you try to conform as much as possible and live by the speed of India. At Drexel, I had much more freedom to express myself as a well-thought-out person. It’s so funny how life changes you and your personality. When I began to work as a consultant traveling around the world, I was really forced to socialize and talk to people. When you’re on the road, if you don’t want to be lonely in a hotel room, you have to make friends at bars and learn to talk to people. So the last 18 years of my life, my personality has been completely different than it was before. Now I give lectures in front of hundreds of people without any fear.
PGN: What was one of your best travel moments?
RK: A recent one was Peru, just seeing how resilient those people are. After being so long under Spanish rule, which tried to erase their history, they persisted and have come back even stronger. And they are such beautiful people with humble souls. I also worked in South Africa for almost two years and that had a big impact on me. Again, a new country that is vibrant with happy, resilient people. Everyone had an exuberance about them and optimism about making the country work. I really admired that.
PGN: What are some of the misconceptions that people have about India?
RK: We try to identify countries by what we see in the media, right? India on one hand gets an image for being exotic. What was that movie? “Eat, Pray, Love,” where she went to India and found her soul and ran naked and sang a song — that cultish, yoga mindset. And then you have other people who think of India as being nothing but poor people and slums. But like any country, those are extremes. With a population of 1.3 billion, you’re going to see great wealth and great poverty. To me the soul of India is struggle; we’ve had almost every country in the world come through India at some point: the Greeks, the Romans, the Turks, the Mongols, the French, the British. Everyone’s taken a piece of India but what’s great about us is that we tend to forgive and forget and move on. The good side is that we’ve been influenced by a lot of cultures. Our cuisine has been very impacted by it. The cuisine you see in restaurants here is just a drop in the bucket, just like the food you would find in Chinatown is completely different from what you’d find in China. Every state in India has completely different food, different clothing, architecture, linguistics. If I’m at home and go to a different state, usually English is the only language I can use to communicate. But I love the Indian attitude: We are a people that generally are not aligned with anyone. As a country we try to stay out of wars, we just try to work hard and stay humble. Even the poorest man in India will split his food with the person next to him or to a little dog on the street. It’s amazing.
PGN: Speaking of amazing, tell me about opening the bar.
RK: Well, if you talk to any of my friends, they’ll tell you it’s a dream I’ve talked about for 15 years. I’ve always felt a kind of peace when I’ve been in a bar. When you’re on the road and you’re by yourself, bars and restaurants are really the only place to find some sort of social life. It’s a way to go for a few moments and forget about work and just have a drink and listen to music or watch TV and meet people. Then when I started coming out, the bars in Philly were a refuge for me. I knew no one but the bartenders were always such lovely people and I would talk to them about all kinds of things; straight guys didn’t care if I was gay, they were just happy to have a pleasant customer who tipped them well. I always felt that I wanted to open a place that would be a safe space for others, people of all types — a place where people could actually talk to each other.
PGN: So how would you describe Writer’s Block?
RK: I would describe it as the most amazing place in the world. [Laughs] I’m kidding, but I think I have created a warm, welcoming, comfortable place, a space where you can come by yourself or with a group of people and the focus is on the customers and hospitality. The whole library idea is to entice people to talk. I wanted to create an intelligent space, a place that brings a diverse group of people together. I mean, liquor and books and music are something that connect all of us together.
PGN: I love the globe chandelier.
RK: I made that! I always imagined a library with lots of globes, but this place is so small I didn’t know where to put them, so I made them into a lighting fixture. I’m very proud because I’m not a crafty person at all!
PGN: What’s a highlight moment as a bar owner?
RK: Just the physical aspect of the bar means a lot to me. I designed it all myself. I love seeing people’s faces when they see the place for the first time and their eyes light up. I now understand how people who create art feel. It’s exciting and fun. There’s also such a sense of accomplishment to know that I’ve done what I set out to do 15 years back and that I was able to do it on my own terms. I didn’t have to take on a partner, I got to do it my way. It took much longer that way but it’s allowed me to create my vision, which was never just to open a bar: It was to create the kind of place I would want to go to. There are plenty of sports bars and neighborhood bars but I wanted someplace different: a swanky cocktail space. Philly has wonderful bars but most of them are food-centric so when you go there, you have to buy food, you can’t just sit there and enjoy a cocktail because they want to turn tables. I wanted a place where I can go with friends or colleagues and just enjoy cocktails and conversation without TV screens blasting sports scores or news. Don’t get me wrong, I love those places too, I just wanted a different choice for people. There’s room for all in this city.
PGN: Tell me about coming out.
RK: Like a lot of Indian families, my parents spent a lot of time introducing me to different women and I would meet them and date them and gave it my best shot. A lot of it was that I was afraid that being gay would affect my career, my life as I knew it. In Indian culture, everyone is sort of sexually fluid, much like the Greeks and Romans: Guys fool around with guys, girls with girls but no one puts a name on it. But when I came to America and discovered the word “gay,” that scared me. I was like, “I can’t do anything to label myself ‘gay,’ I just can’t.” When you give it a name, it’s then a thing. So I started dating women and I enjoyed it. They were all beautiful people. I was even engaged to a girl and we were going to get married. I really liked her a lot — I’d even say loved — but the more I thought about it, I realized I didn’t want to affect someone’s life because I was copping out because I was scared. It wasn’t her burden to carry so I called the wedding off. Soon after, I was working on an IT project and one of my team members was a Dutch guy. He was a proud gay man, super successful in his career, and for the first time it gave me confidence that you could be out and proud in a corporate environment. I was working for large companies like IBM, etc., who talked the talk about equality but in reality I saw LGBT colleagues get second-class treatment. But this guy was fearless and respected and it gave me the confidence to come out. Mind you, this was, like, 14 years ago; the corporate scene is much better now.
PGN: And I understand that you’re a married man now. How did you meet your hubby?
RK: A few years after I came out, I went to a party in New York. It was a big party for South Asian gay men and I really didn’t want to go. [Laughs] I wasn’t into Indian guys. My type was anything but — Caucasian, African-American, anything that was the opposite of me. But my friends dragged me to the party. Towards the end of the night, I saw Akshay, and the moment we met I could feel that it was something bigger than me; there was a palpable sense of electricity in the air. I still can’t articulate how I felt, but we immediately connected. I extended my stay in New York and we started dating. It was long distance for a while because of all my traveling but three years ago we decided to put down roots in Philly, get married and open a bar!
PGN: Nice. Tell me about the wedding.
RK: It was fun. The whole thing was pretty much unplanned. A week before, we decided to do it and we rented a horse and carriage for the day. Our friends started showing up and we ended up blocking off the street and had an impromptu block party. We had a drummer and a person doing henna, and we were really nervous because we didn’t have a permit to shut the street, we just did it. But all our neighbors came out and danced and it was so much fun! We ended up with over 100 people showing up and it became a three-day Bollywood event. It was nuts!
PGN: A favorite author?
RK: Rakesh Stayal. He wrote a book called “Blue Boy” which, for me, was very important because it’s about a gay child trying to come out in Sri Lanka. It’s a beautiful, well-written book and we’re trying to get him here for a book signing. He was just at Barnes & Noble a few weeks ago for his new book, “No One Can Pronounce My Name.”
PGN: What do you think your role is as a business philanthropist?
RK: For me, I think it’s important to get involved with the community as a whole, not just the gay community. I feel very connected with the city and feel it’s important that as a business owner I give back. I think gay businesses in this community need to start playing a larger role. A friend is starting a summer camp for girls from underserved communities; it’s such a great cause, we’re doing a fundraiser. It’s also important not just to give money but to get out there — help clean streets, plant trees, organize a safety patrol. There is so much more we can be doing beyond sponsoring a float in the Pride parade. Too often, people are focused on the net revenue; of course that’s important, but we also need to find ways to be more useful to our communities. I love the fact that all different types of people come to our bar: gay, straight, all walks of life. We had an older straight couple here who were fascinated to find two gay brown men married to each other. We had a great conversation. To me, our bars should almost be like community centers. Places like New York and Philadelphia are meccas for people coming out. We get people from across the country who leave home and travel to a city like ours so they can be themselves. We should be ready with open arms. We owe it to them and to ourselves to be interesting and diverse, and welcoming.
PGN: What are some of the new ideas happening at the bar?
RK: We’re going to start serving brunch on weekends and we’re going to have a full coffee shop soon with espressos, tea and kombucha. We want this to be a flex space where people can come here during the day and work. We’ll have super-fast Internet available for everyone and then you can transition right into cocktail hour if you want! We’re excited about the new frozen cocktail machine that should be arriving soon. We pride ourselves on the innovative drink menu here and that will just add to it. We’re going to start entertaining book clubs and book signings here and looking forward to having a young writers’ series in the near future. We’re also going to start doing wine and whiskey school nights on Tuesdays so people can learn and drink. There’s going to be something special each night here at Writer’s Block!
For more information about Writer’s Block Rehab, visit https://www.facebook.com/writersblockrehab/.
To suggest a community member for Family Portrait, email [email protected].