Photo: Uma Devi Pemmaraju, with her Guru, Swami Satchidananda, 1993.
Uma Devi Pemmaraju passed away in early August 2022 at the age of 64. She was the daughter of the late Dr. P. N. Rao and his wife, Rani, mother of Kirana Petkun. The entire family, including Uma’s siblings, Dr. Rama Pemmaraju and Dr. Shankar Pemmaraju, were longtime close devotees of Integral Yoga founder Sri Swami Satchidananda (Gurudev). The Rao family often hosted Gurudev in their home, organizing public lectures and programs at their local Hindu temple in San Antonio, Texas.
Uma Devi, an esteemed broadcast journalist was a founding anchor at Fox News Channel. She was the first Indian-American anchor to regularly appear on national TV. Born in India, she moved with her family to San Antonio as a baby. In high school, she worked as a reporter for the San Antonio Express-News, and interviewed CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite, the NY Times reported. She got her degree at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, and went into local TV. Pemmaraju worked at a station in Baltimore before landing anchor jobs at WLVI and WBZ in Boston, and was a correspondent on WBZ’s Evening Magazine. She was very loved and respected in the Boston journalist community and also taught journalism at Emerson College and Harvard University.
She left Fox in 2018 and joined Bloomberg News, where she worked for a year before leaving to focus on several book projects inspired by her deep spirituality and her Guru’s teachings. At the time of her death, she was working on a book about heroic deeds done by everyday people.
The entire Integral Yoga and Satchidananda Ashram–Yogaville sangha extends our deepest and most heartfelt condolences to the entire family and prayers for the eternal peace of Uma Devi’s soul.
