[Times photos: John Pendygraft]
Hiranya Derasari, 14, gets help with her earrings before a traditional dance in October at the Indian Cultural Center.

By KATHRYN WEXLER

TAMPA -- Amid the humdrum strip malls of N Dale Mabry Highway, an Indian millionaire sits in an office with marble inlay floors, thumbing his nose at destiny.

Tampa cardiologist and businessman Kiran Patel stands in his office, in front of a copper wall of busts of Indians who have influenced his life.

"Don't tell me, "This was your fate,' " said Dr. Kiran Patel, explaining his philosophy. "God gives you a choice. The fruit of that action you will bear."

The fruits of Patel's actions were all around him recently, as he discussed the meaning of life and how he's making a mint.

In the lobby of his executive offices, a 24-karat, gold-leafed banyan tree sculpture scrapes the ceiling. His conference table was designed to mimic Mount Rushmore, its sunken center a tiny canyon depicting Patel and his extended family. On one office wall is a giant outcropping of two dozen copper busts.

Who is this mild-mannered man with a taste for the wildly extravagant?

Among Tampa Bay's Indian community, quietly thriving amid suburban America, he is a role model, a philanthropist, a booster of Indian culture. But "Dr. K.," as he is widely known, is also finding himself thrust in the role of a unifier of a flourishing but increasingly fractious Indian community.

To the rest, Patel is simply a cardiologist and owner of Well Care HMO and HealthEase Health Plan, providing coverage to more than 200,000 Florida residents primarily on Medicaid.

"In our community, there is a saying: If anyone has a good cause, he will not be disappointed when he meets with Dr. K," said Kirit Shaw, president of a drug research company.

Patel, 51, has emerged as the most visible face of a growing immigrant population claiming its place, dollar by dollar, in the area's upper class. Just the other week, he was on local TV, rallying donations for India's earthquake victims. To spark the giving, he pledged $50,000.

Next on his checklist is burnishing the Indian community's reputation. And getting politicians to return its phone calls.

"Unfortunately, for our investment in time and money, we are not getting the attention we should," Patel said.

Yet, Patel says he's working toward something deeper than political influence for the Indian community.

And he's doing it the American way: with money.

* * *

One day 10 years ago, Patel happened to be at Tampa International Airport when a different Dr. Patel was paged. He rushed to a phone.

Though the two had never met, he wanted to get a message to the other Dr. Patel: "Come to Tampa!"

During the early years, it was Kiran Patel's constant refrain. Raised the son of an accountant in Zambia, Patel said his Indian identity was affirmed through the local Indian community. His only stint in India was for medical school, where he met his future wife, Pallavi, a classmate and now a pediatrician. They settled in New Jersey with their three young children and in 1982 moved to Tampa, where Patel's brother owned a motel.

Six years later, he and his wife became American citizens. In the 1980s, Hillsborough County was still something of a frontier for Indians, a place where curry wasn't even a novelty to the locals yet. He immediately began recruiting other Indian doctors.

"I wanted to be among my people, my kind, my language, my profession," Patel said in a diluted Indian accent. "Anybody I met, anybody I saw, I said, "Tampa is great. Just come over.' "

Equally important, the dozens of Indian newcomers helped Patel staff the small clinics he was buying. Patel readily admits it generated controversy.

In exchange for signing a non-compete agreement -- Patel said he never enforced it -- the doctors got a professional foothold and entree into the up-and-coming Indian community.

"Many people may think that made me rich," Patel said, but "they made money."

Said Ravi Khant, a Tampa cardiologist, "I'm sure the salary is good enough to come but not to stay (with Patel) in the long term."

The ranks of Indian doctors here swelled. "Those doctors bring other doctors," said Pallavi Patel, 50. "It has multiplied."

Today, a local association of Indian physicians has 450 members, whose families constitute a large and influential chunk of the estimated 5,000 or 6,000 Tampa Bay area residents of Indian origin. They're primarily concentrated in northern Hillsborough County.

Many of them, like Patel, hail from the west Indian state of Gujarat.

Patel's Florida medical license is in good standing, but it wasn't always the case. In 1994, he was put on two years' medical probation for misdiagnosing a massive heart attack in Hillsborough County. The patient died several days later.

Now, he is more businessman than doctor. He practices medicine on average about once a week when he sees his most long-standing patients. He spends the rest of his time managing his health care companies in Florida, Connecticut and New York.

As Patel's star rose, the Indian community grew up around him. In the late 1970s, 45 people belonged to the local Indian Club, mostly motel owners. Mirroring immigration patterns across the country, the Tampa Bay area next saw an influx of more educated Indian immigrants, many of them doctors and computer engineers leapfrogging the hardships of the previous generation.

"I think we have the cream of India here," said Naresh Kalra, a dentist and Carrollwood resident.

Five years ago, they built the cavernous Indian Cultural Center and its Hindu temple next door on Lynne Road in northwest Hillsborough County, which seemed like exotic oddities among mobile homes and freshly paved subdivisions. A dozen artisans from the town of Mahabalipurim are carving seven elaborate stories of cement sculpture for the temple's south Indian dome.

Albert Freire, a truck driver who bought a plot of land to build a house before the temple went up across the street, can't fathom what he sees from his front yard.

"One time, they had their sculpture things, and they were putting water on it and singing and dancing," he said in disbelief. "I was laughing and laughing."

But Patel and his peers say that in subtler ways, they fit seamlessly into polyglot America. They hold prominent positions at local institutions. Their children go to private schools.

And yet, some say the community's very success has come at a cost.

A sense of Indian commonality has given way to age-old social and ethnic divisions of the Indian subcontinent, some complain.

"When we started, we were absolutely one," said Husain Nagamia, a cardiac surgeon at Tampa General Hospital. "Now there's the Gujarati society, the Punjabi society, the Bengali society, the Karnatica society. We have this regionalism."

The most obvious social schism is between north and south Indians, who are mostly Hindu but worship different forms of deities and have different religious rituals. North Indians tend to speak Hindi and regional languages such as Gujarati, while south Indians converse mainly in Telugu and Tamil. Whenever a new temple goes up, Indians instantly distinguish whether it is north Indian or south from its architecture.

And there are the usual immigrant growing pains. As the young generation grows up with Eminem and Bud Light, their parents worry about keeping them in the fold, said P.D. Patel, chairman of the community's crisis committee formed to counsel Indian families wrestling with very American problems.

Jag Bakarania, a Hillsborough Community College student, said that as a recent arrival, he is shunned by his peers of Indian origin who have American accents and passports.

"They just ignore us," he said recently at a function at the Cultural Center. "They don't like Indian born."

Despite the rifts, a collective effort is under way to make the Indian community a cohesive economic and political power in its own right.

And plenty think that Patel, with a house on Lake Carroll and a Lamborghini, Ferarri and Mercedes in the garage, is the man to lead the way as the community comes into its own.

"He knows how important it is to build the Indian community, but also that the Indian community has to be connected to the American community," said Renu Khator, political science professor at the University of South Florida.

Patel is pushing to bring the multiple Indian earthquake relief efforts by various local Indian groups under one Tampa Bay umbrella fund. The Indo-U.S. Chamber of Commerce, formed two years ago in Hillsborough County, meets monthly to promote partnerships among Indians and with non-Indians.

Last year, Patel gave $15,000 to the Republican Party and several thousand more to local candidates. And he says he wants well-heeled Indians to shed their inherent distrust of politicians and learn how to lobby.

"In America, if they want to see their interests taken into consideration and laws changed, they have to give money and get involved," Patel said.

Plenty agree that the Indian community is just starting to grasp its potential.

Said Vansant Chapnerker, a retired chemical engineer, "Ten years from now, we will be controlling the economy here."

* * *

Patel approached the Original Carrollwood Tax Board last year after hearing it wanted to spruce up the recreation center. He was interested in making a hefty donation but questioned whether the rec center could be renamed in honor of such a benefactor.

The board didn't pursue it. Neither did Patel.

"We just sort of thought about it and got the impression we should look at other options," said then-board member Greg Cox.

But Patel did get credit for pledging $400,000 to the University of South Florida's charter school last March. The school's name: the USF Kiran Patel Charter School.

Seeing his name on buildings around town is something Patel said he would like very much -- but not for self-aggrandizement, he insists.

"When people see Indians who have Mercedeses and homes, they fantasize we don't contribute," he said.

Non-Indians are publicly venerated for their generosity, he noted. Patel said he has noticed local landmarks with Anglo names, like Cooper and Scott.

"Why not a Patel?"

Next month, he will hold his first Hope Charity Ball to raise scholarship money for 71 inner-city children, all non-Indian. He's lobbying Indians to ante up to $5,000 for a table at the event, to be held at the Indian Cultural Center.

And he's burning up the phone lines to get Gov. Jeb Bush to attend.

So what drives Dr. Patel?

Ever a foreigner in his adopted homelands, first in Africa, and now America, he has found that standing in the social margins of the mainstream isn't a particularly comfortable posture. And he doesn't want the Indian community to feel segregated by virtue of its distinctness.

"We obviously stand out as a different color," he said. "Giving money is important, so people know us better."

-- Kathryn Wexler can be reached at (813) 226-3383 or wexler@sptimes.com.

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