Listen to Story In 2013, the Yale Law School organised a study group on the 'social decline in white America'. Two students organised this project. One had grown up in poor areas of Ohio where his mother had been a victim of addiction.
That student was JD Vance, the Ohio senator picked by Donald Trump to be his running mate . The other student was Usha Chilukuri Vance , the daughter of Hindu Indian immigrants. She wanted to conduct this study group because she was curious about the topic.
She was also Vance's girlfriend. Vance was smitten the moment he had seen Usha. "She seemed some sort of genetic anomaly, a combination of every positive quality a human being should have: bright, hardworking, tall, and beautiful,” he wrote in his memoir -- Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.
Vance's 2016 memoir was turned into a motion picture in 2020. “I joked with a buddy that if she had possessed a terrible personality, she would have made an excellent heroine in an Ayn Rand novel, but she had a great sense of humour and an extraordinarily direct way of speaking," Vance talks about Usha in the memoir. Usha is now his wife.
And as Trump introduced Vance as his vice-presidential choice, Usha stood firmly by his side. Usha has been Vance's lodestar, be it in his spiritual or political quest. She is also his sheet anchor, keeping him rooted.
“Usha definitely brings me back to earth,” Vance told Megan Kelly in a podcast. “If I get a little too cocky or a lit.
