Shashi Gholkar Memorial Scholarship

Shashi Gholkar was born in 1940 in India.  He grew up in the small town of Vasai, a distant suburb of what is now known as Mumbai.  He graduated valedictorian of his high school class and after completing his BS in Mechanical Engineering at Walchand College of Engineering he came to the US in 1963 to pursue graduate studies at New York University.  After graduating with an MS in Industrial Engineering, he went back to India to marry Rekha Joshi in 1967.  Rekha followed Shashi to the US and after short stints in the Detroit and Boston areas, they arrived in Rochester when Shashi received a job offer from Xerox.  They purchased a home in Webster in 1973 where they lived for the next 20 years and raised their two daughters, Pallavi and Preeya.  In 1978, after many years of working for others, Shashi decided to become his own boss.  With Rekha’s help they opened a franchise retail store, Dahnken, located in Henrietta, which they operated until 1988.  Eventually what started as a retail store morphed into Gholkar’s, Inc. which they began that same year as a supplier of office supplies to Eastman Kodak and other local businesses.  Shashi passed away in 2015 after a brief but valiant fight with cancer.  In his later years he gave to many charitable organizations both locally and in India, delivered food for Meals on Wheels, and started an annual program to provide backpacks and school supplies to the students of the Theodore Roosevelt School in the city of Rochester.  He believed strongly in the power of education and that all children deserve the same opportunities regardless of their financial circumstances.  It is because of this belief that his family has created this scholarship in his memory.