Mountain View recently lost one of its brightest stars, when Anuj Mohan, a gifted academic, spirited athlete and dedicated humanitarian, died tragically at the age of 30.
Mohan was a saintly figure to his family members, who established a scholarship fund in his honor. And he was so widely known and loved that in the short time since his death, the fund has already raised more than $30,000, all from individual well-wishers, his brother Neal Mohan said.
On May 17, Mohan was fatally injured while swimming at the North Park Apartments swimming pool on Rengstorff Avenue. Details are not known, but an apparent accident resulted in his near-drowning at the pool.
He was rushed to El Camino Hospital, where he clung to life for weeks, then died on June 11.
“My family was by his bedside day and night for four weeks,” Neal Mohan said. He said that the time his brother was hospitalized “allowed the opportunity for literally hundreds of his friends and family to come in from not just all over the Bay Area, but all over the country and all over the world.”
Neal Mohan said he was astonished at these visitors’ stories about his brother, all of which had one thing in common: They demonstrated how deeply Mohan had touched each of their lives.
“I think it was testament to how Anuj conducted himself,” he said. “It was good certainly for my mom and dad to hear that.”
Mohan was born on April 9, 1976, in Florida, and his family later moved to Michigan. In the mid-1980s, the family moved to India, to a city 300 miles south of New Delhi. Mohan, still in elementary school, was thrust into a new culture.
“He took it as a fun kind of a challenge,” Neal Mohan said. “And before you knew it he was really one of the most popular kids in school.”
In 1994, Mohan returned to the U.S. to study at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering.
In 1999, he joined his older brother Neal in Mountain View and “rode the dot-com roller coaster,” his brother said. In his free time, Mohan founded the Software Entrepreneurship Lecture Series for the 8,000-member MIT Alumni Club of Northern California. The series is still held every month, bringing venture capitalists, CEOs and others to venues on the Peninsula.
Saved father’s life
Eventually, under extraordinary circumstances, the Mohans’ mother and father joined them in Mountain View.
Their parents were still living in India when their father, Aditiya Mohan, was diagnosed with a kidney disease. Doctors said he would die if he did not receive a new kidney soon.
Determined to get his father the needed transplant, Mohan returned to India in 2002, visited the American embassy there and broke down bureaucratic barriers to expedite Aditiya Mohan’s passage to the U.S. What is normally several-year process, Neal Mohan said, took little over a month.
Mohan returned and “did the same thing with the medical establishment in the U.S.,” Neal Mohan said. Their father was quickly put on the kidney transfer list at Stanford and UCSF.
“Six months ago, my dad finally received a kidney transplant,” Neal Mohan said. His brother’s assertiveness, he said, “basically saved his life.”
Mohan eventually returned to school, finishing the first year of an MBA degree at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
“Anuj was extraordinary,” stated Anjani Jain, vice dean and director of the Wharton graduate division, on the school’s Web site. “He excelled, with grace and humility, in all aspects of his Wharton experience — academics, athletics, co-curricular pursuits, and community commitment. He carried his ample talents with a tremendous generosity of spirit and deeply touched the lives of many in our community who came to know him.”
Mohan remained a sports enthusiast throughout his life — he was an active bicyclist and soccer player, and played varsity baseball while at MIT — and was an accomplished researcher. In fact, a paper Mohan published while at MIT continues to be regularly cited in engineering journals.
His broad range of skills and interests, and his gregarious nature, made him truly a child of Silicon Valley, “an entrepreneur through and through,” said his brother Neal.
“He was intellectually very curious, technically a brilliant person … but he was curious across the board; he cared a lot about what was happening in the world, cared a lot about people’s lives,” Neal Mohan said.
“He had tremendous leadership skills, knew how to rally around a cause. He didn’t do that in a rah-rah way, he did it in a quiet way.”
DONATIONS Anuj Mohan was passionate about education for all, so his family started the Anuj Mohan Scholarship Fund, designed to provide endowments to students wishing to attend MIT or Wharton business school. The family hopes to raise at least $150,000. For more information, visit www.anujmohan.com.The family soon will be partnering with the Community Foundation of Silicon Valley, a nonprofit that helps manage such funds. Until then, checks made out to “Anuj Mohan Scholarship Fund” can be mailed to:
2400 W. El Camino Real, No. 419
Mountain View, CA 94040
E-mail Don Frances at dfrances@mv-voice.com
