Sheela Pandey

“The wise … endowed with equanimity, having abandoned the fruits of action, go to the abode beyond all sorrow and evil.” - Bhagvad Gita, Chapter 2, Verse 51 (Swami Vivekananda’s translation)

“I say to you that I am a little child and you are my parents.  Accept me as such and give me a place in your hearts. By saying “Mother”, you keep me at a distance.  Mothers have to be revered and respected.  But a little girl needs to be loved and looked after and is dear to the heart of everyone. So this is my only request to you: to make a place for me in your hearts!” – Anandamayi Ma (20th Century Spiritual Guru)

“Give me courage to meet hardships; make me calm in the face of the unavoidable. Relax the straitened limits of time which is allotted me. Show me that the good in life does not depend upon life’s length, but upon the use we make of it.” – Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Richard M. Gummere translation)

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Our hearts are full of love and gratitude for giving us a front-row view of how to live a life full of love, grace, kindness, equanimity, and joy.  Our hearts are also full of longing for more, a longing that needs to recognize the fullness and richness of what you did in 51 short years. With your inimitable ingenuity you packed these 51 years – as a family member, friend, and Guru -- with several lifetimes worth of good.

Sheela Pandey, the eldest child of Radhika Rani Tiwary and Ramesh Chandra Tiwary, was born in 1972.  As a child, Sheela was nurtured with the love of an extended family, particularly her uncle Gopal Chandra Tiwary and auntie, Amita Tiwary.  Sheela excelled in academics. with her three younger brothers, Rajneesh, Ranveer, and Rahul looking up to Didi for encouragement and guidance as they worked through school and life.  A couple of years after completing her Bachelor of Engineering degree in India, Sheela married Sanjay and moved to the USA. Together with Sanjay, Sheela (the love of Sanjay’s life), built a life partnership in America, raising two wonderful children, Shivani and Krish, and collaborated in life and in work over the last 26 years. Sheela taught at four different universities and was on the faculty of the Pennsylvania State University Harrisburg at the time of her passing.

Sheela, without trying and without artifice, found the way to your heart imprinting vivid memories of her voice, her presence, and her beauty, both inner and outer!  Sheela brought everyone’s humanity to the fore.  Friends, family, and students knew that Sheela was one person you could count on to be positive and be in your corner during good times and not so good times.  And she did so by bringing all her ingenuity, curiosity, kindness, playfulness, tenacity, and considerable abilities to commune with and support others.

Sheela’s ingenuity as a teacher, scholar, and friend opened the world for her friends and students, and the world of ideas for her colleagues.  Her scholarship challenged and encouraged management scholars to pay closer attention to the social impact of business, providing new ways of thinking about supporting entrepreneurs from socially marginalized groups.  Starting with her doctoral dissertation, Sheela developed cutting-edge methodological approaches melding management scholarship with computer science scholarship, presaging current understanding that natural language artifacts are rich repositories of social science data.

Sheela’s impact as a teacher flowed from her unique teaching style deploying rich analogies and vivid imagery, and an abiding belief that professors have a responsibility to support well-being of the whole individual.  Curious about Sheela’s research at the intersection of computer science and management, students asked her if she would teach them how to use natural language processing and other computational social science tools.  Students were inspired by her aplomb in challenging situations and felt empowered to enquire about her spiritual practices, following it up with requests to teach them meditation.  Sheela thought about the constraints of the curriculum but wanted to encourage and support her students. She found a workaround, offering weekend workshops to satisfy student curiosity and drive to learn about computational social science and meditation.

Sheela’s ingenuity was fueled by her boundless curiosity. She saw connections that were not apparent to the rest of us.  She took to studying Sanskrit because of its rich philosophical and spiritual literature and along the way found out and shared how this gave her insights into machine learning and natural language processing. Sheela would draw upon her spiritual inquiry and intellectual curiosity to offer perspective to friends that few are equipped to offer. Sheela would provide friends a reference to a resource (or practice) and encourage them to explore their inner world. To the agnostic she might suggest mindfulness-based stress reduction resources and to the believer Sri Vidya Sadhana or something else consistent with their religious orientation. Sheela would often point out a fact few knew and a fact that challenged our simplistic worldview (e.g., women may have been the first drummers in human history!)

Sheela’s fondness for plants and garden as a child blossomed into a lifelong love and quest. As a young child, her small flower patch was a source of pride and joy for her and she nurtured the flower patch and shielded it from harm by the unaware or the uncaring.  Her love for plants and flowers grew on Sanjay and other family members.  Sheela’s gardens over the years made room for dozen or more different varieties of rose, as many or more of jasmine flowers, and other vibrant colors, fragrances, and nectar offering refuge for butterflies and bees, and other creatures.

Sheela’s kindness, sometimes coupled with playfulness, lightened heavy moments. At other times, being around her offered perspective on positivity, kindness, and grace, and a model for being and interacting.  Children and the young had a special place in her heart.  Krish, Shivani, and other children in the family, the neighborhood, and elsewhere were drawn to her big smile and the ability to easily shift into age-appropriate banter and play. Sheela instinctively knew what to do in the moment to lift someone’s spirits, making unexpected gifts of flowers from her garden to the young and the old.

Sheela would at a moment’s notice step out of her routine to help and support people she had just met.  Noticing two young children’s awkward efforts to play tennis in the neighborhood park, Sheela reached out, giving them tips, playing with them, and sharing her love and knowledge of tennis. Late at night, a distraught woman stood by the road having struck a deer with her car. Sheela talked with the woman and noticing her distress offered her company, listening to her sorrow at the impending death of the deer and offering consolation and reassurance.

When Sheela encountered unkindness from sources that are expected to be kind and supportive, she reflected but did not deviate from her instinctive kindness.  In a conversation, an oncologist sure of his knowledge of oncology and of the depths of human condition, advised Sheela, “Your job is not to die on us.”  Sheela listened to this gauche and tactless comment, reflected on it and in a later meeting told this oncologist that he was wrong in offering this advice. Instead, she counseled the oncologist that her job was to live and his job was to make sure she did not die. Sometime later this oncologist, full of himself, asked her to buy a book he had written about his journey as a caregiver and Sheela bought the book. Where most would have dismissed this tactless and smug caregiver, Sheela forgave him, bought a copy of his book, and, in her interactions, offered a model for how to relate with and care for even those who are not very skilled at caregiving.

Sheela’s tenacity and resourcefulness to support those she cared for (friends, family, students etc.) led Shivani and Krish to often tell her, “Mom, you are next-level.” Others who knew Sheela well would say that Sheela did not know the word impossible. Sheela was determined to visit India in late 2023, both for herself and to connect Shivani and her partner Dave with the rich cultural heritage of India. This was at the height of India-Canada tensions, and it seemed like getting a visa for Dave would be impossible. Not so! Sheela quickly enlisted the help of friends and family. Notably, she called the Indian Consulate no less than forty times, meditating and trying a new 4-number extension each time to get through to a real person. Her efforts were fruitful, and they experienced an unforgettable final India trip together.

Sheela lives on in the hearts of her family members, friends, and students.  Sheela’s spark and light illuminated the right path for many and when you faltered on this path, her support energized and enabled you to persevere. The warm embrace of Sheela’s love remained and remains an ever-present anchor in the lives of family members, friends, and has touched the lives of countless students she taught at four different universities and even strangers.

The family encourages friends, family members, students, and others to do good deeds just like Sheela did to the brim in her seemingly short but substantively long journey in the world.