Pillai also wants to do something to increase the voter turnout
Indian American engineer Hari I Pillai announced his candidacy for the Cambridge City Council’s elections on November 7.
Born and raised in the Mississippi Delta to Indian immigrants, Pillai holds an MS in Engineering from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He completed BS in Engineering from the Mississippi State University.
He earlier worked at GE Power Systems as a Process and Quality Engineer, and eventually moved to the Boston Area in 2000. He also worked as a tutor, health and wellness coach at the Oak Square YMCA, and in the last few years, Pillai has been an Account Manager in the Telecom Sector.
“Outside my career, I’ve involved myself in many campaigns for local, state, and federal elections, and did a lot of volunteer work as a Massachusetts Service Alliance grant reviewer, mentoring young kids, and volunteer at Massachusetts Correctional Institution – Shirley to promote mindfulness and to cultivate spiritual practices using Buddhism as a vehicle ” Pillai said on his official campaign website. “At my work, I’m a member of African American Business Leaders for Excellence (ABLE), Asian American Professional Group, and pride in addition to mentoring and coaching junior employees.”
Pillai offers his candidacy to be a counterpoint to the values of the Trump administration saying that the Administration’s “vision of hate has no place here.”
Other top priorities of the Indian American candidate are maintaining Cambridge’s uniqueness, not selling the values just for more economic growth, lack of shared parking in Alewife and other parts of Cambridge, addressing the dismal internet services in Cambridge and the Volpe Redevelopment Project.
Pillai also wants to do something to increase the voter turnout in the municipal election as he believes that democracy works best when all voices are heard.
According to the official campaign website, Pillai was a Graduate Student Senator while doing MS at RPI and had taught the non-traditional Navy students Differential Equations/Calculus in RPI’s Extension Program in Malta, New York. He also volunteered at Zoller Elementary School in Schenectady.
Pillai is the son of activist educators. His father worked as a Physics professor at a Historically Black College (HBC), helping to drive some social reforms including leading student rallies to implement Martin Luther King Day. Pillai’s mother was a middle-school science teacher for an inner-city school.