Indolink.com carries a good article highlighting a study by Samir Patel, Nausheen Rokerya and Maneka Singh at Cornell University titled, Switchovers: Indian American Drinking Culture at Cornell
. The study claims to be the “first academic survey of ‘Indian American drinking culture’ in a college campus [setting].” The study sought to lock in on incoming desi undergrads who saw a particularly significant shift in their attitudes about alcohol (from something viewed as strictly taboo to something very normal and even necessary to have a good time).
Who were the subjects of this study? They were 12 Indian-American Cornell undergraduates – five male, seven female – who began drinking only after their freshman year of college. Demographically, nine were from the northeast, one was from the Midwest, one was from the west, and one was from the south. When questioned about their religious affiliation, three students identified themselves as being Jain, and nine as Hindus. [Link]
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Since most of the people that read this site have graduated from college, the rest of this will be a bit nostalgic (and may even make some of you nauseous). If you find yourself getting angry or thinking, “kids these days…” it means you are getting wiser (AND possibly that kids are getting dumber).
First of all the study reveals that all of the freshman students were shocked upon arriving at Cornell and witnessing the heavy drinking atmosphere among their senior Indian counterparts. All interviewees also indicated a struggle between a desire to maintain roots and yet still get the full experience of American college life.
The authors argue that the “switchovers” adopted mainstream American culture and that the “adoption of this culture and consequent ideological shift was caused by a combination of socialization needs, avoidance of fears, and academic pressures,” including the desire to be popular among the opposite sex.
The study begins by claiming that the abstinent culture of the average Desi student can be attributed to the strong Hindu background and their parents’ primarily educational immigration motive.
However, upon entering college, the same Desi students realize that the culture found at Cornell is radically different from that which they were used to at home. They were particularly surprised that this culture, which so heavily promoted drinking and partying, was so willingly embraced by the college Indian community. One student did not “expect that this many Indian kids would drink” and was stunned as to how much Desi students did drink. They found that this new culture assigned significant value to “having fun” and recreation, as well as doing well in school: the “work-hard, party-hard” mentality that many of their non-Indian high school friends embodied, was also a value for many Desis at Cornell. [Link]
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p>So let me break down for the researchers what I observed in college. For an increasingly greater number of students (desi and otherwise) “getting wasted” becomes a reward. It is something you deserve at the end of a long week for being an overachieving Indian student (even if your grades suck). Plus, everyone else is doing it and it might make it easier to talk to that girl/guy because, you know, maybe you aren’t that interesting otherwise. Another reason you may want to get wasted is because you don’t know how to tell your parents that you don’t want to be a doctor:
Many of the students apparently altered their life goals between the time that they entered college and the time that they began drinking, the study notes. According to the authors, this indicates a shift in ideology.
For example, one student’s goal during her freshman year was to do well in school so that she could prove to herself and her parents that she could in fact handle a Cornell workload. She never anticipated partying and socializing as being a big part of her life, but “the people [she] lived with went out to parties a lot so she went with them once in a while” and became exposed to alcohol. Similarly another student’s goal was to maintain a primarily academic focus. His goal was to excel academically, compensating for the fact that he did not get into MIT. During his freshman year, he placed “an emphasis on school work, not being social,” going out to parties only occasionally. Another male student said that his goal during freshman year was to “do well academically and get a high GPA.” A third male student’s goals were “not to get kicked out of Cornell, not to drink, to make good friends, to have a girlfriend, and to socialize…” [Link]
In August I attended a conference here in Houston titled, “Alcohol & Drug Abuse Among South Asians.” I was actually there to register people for the South Asian bone marrow registry but I did spend a good portion of the time listening to some of the talks. I was pleasantly surprised to see quite a few desi teenagers there with their parents. The better informed these parents are, the less of a chance their children will be shocked when they get to college.
After the students had switched over, they found themselves to be better assimilated into the Cornell culture. Whereas before the students often preferred to stay at home on weekends to study or relax, they now blended in with the rest of Cornell’s Indian drinkers, often starting their weekends off on a Thursday or even a Wednesday night. One student said that now he frequently “goes to the bars on a Thursday. Sometimes, [he’ll] even go on a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, if [he doesn’t] have anything due the next morning.
The study concludes that desi students’ alcohol consumption served as a rite of integration.
A student promptly summed this up in her description of the Indian drinking scene at Cornell. “There were times when people got drunk, but most of the time, people were just buzzed. At a typical party, you’d see a couple of kids that were wasted, and everyone else would be pretty normal.” Another student recalls that even when he thought his friends were very drunk, they could act normal when they had to. He remembers, “Once my friend’s mom called him while we were walking home from a party. I thought he was going to say something stupid, but he played it off pretty well. She still doesn’t know that he drinks…” [Link]
So naturally, you know how this post is going to end. Let’s have it you anonymous commenters whose parents (unlike mine) are not reading this. Tell us about your first experience with alcohol IF it was in college like the students in this study. Let the college students of tomorrow learn from your collective experience 🙂
Hah! …I’m sorry, but this made me laugh. Also, I’m in college right now and I get along with the brown folk even though I drink very rarely. I think you have to take into account a particular school’s ‘feel’ and social scene, and from everything I’ve heard, Cornell is a big drinking school (fraternity-style, there’s a desi frat and a desi sorority there I believe) in general. Based on just what you’ve summarized, I get the feeling that this study has a too-small sample (especially considering that Cornell undergrad has like 13,000 undergrads and there are definitely more than 12 desis there!), and I also feel like the study overstates the ‘desi’-ness of how the students changed their goals, attitudes toward drinking, etc. I feel like this is very common among undergards at schools like Cornell, where probably a lot of the students came from sheltered middle class/upper middle class backgrounds. I’m also not appreciating the supposed ‘dichotomy’ between a ‘Hindu upbringing’ and starting to drink/party/socialize more.
My first drinking experience was in high school, as it was for many of the desis I know (some of whom are now at Cornell, heh). I do think, though, that the following students are dumbasses:
Unless they’re amazing at multi-tasking and super-efficient with schoolwork, they’re probably missing classes/skipping assignments, and probably wasting their parents’ money. If you’re paying full tuition at a school like Cornell (which most desis probably are), that’s like $100 wasted per class missed.
oops, I just read the ‘if he doesn’t have anything due the next morning’ part. so i reserve my judgment in this case. but i do have a cousin in college who has a drinking problem–he depends on alcohol in order to be social, to hook up, etc. Not only do I think it’s dangerous in the context of hooking up, I think it’s sad that the goal is not to get buzzed and have a good time, but to get as wasted as you possibly can in the least amount of time (e.g. ‘power hour’).
Hey I resent this!
I do wonder how ‘taboo’ alcohol is for those whose parents drink socially, versus those whose parents don’t. My dad and his friends regularly get together and drink and gamble, and even my mother will drink some wine once in a while. She even told me that if I didn’t drink until I graduated college, she would buy me my first drink, haha.
I just wanted to clarify what I meant by this (sorry for so many comments, but finally there’s something on SM that I can talk about with relative expertise!). I feel like the study is saying that the life goal changes, changes in attitude toward alcohol, etc. require ‘reconciling desi roots’ with ‘mainstream American college culture,’ when I don’t think it is a desi thing so much as a general college experience. Maybe amplified for desis who come from conservative families whose parents always told them ‘indians don’t even think about sex or alcohol or rock music!’ and didn’t know enough other desis to know that partaking of sex/alcohol/rock n roll/whatever and being desi doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive. so i’m, uh, glad for them that they’re learning this in college?
Well I graduated in the 90s. Even way back then, Indian students – ABDs and DBDs drank almost as much as whites in my college. If you went to a party, almost every Indian I knew drank. As far as binge drinking, I think whites do the most. And white females definitely outnumber ABD and DBD women when it comes to getting so smashed you end up puking the next few hours.
I think DBD women drank the least. But DBD guys had no problems drinking. In fact, a lot more DBDs smoked compared to ABDs. Though more ABDs were more adventurous with pot compared to DBDs.
Yeah, this is pretty accurate. I arrived at school with the whole drinking is taboo thing. In my dorm I had a fellow-desi across the hall who drank. They were cool, and we talked a lot. And they would always ask why I didn’t drink. And I never really had a solid answer. Eventually after missing out when everyone would go out to parties, and sitting around a bunch of drunk friends was no longer fun, I started to think more about it. On my 18th birthday (a few months into college) I had my first beer. I would then slowly increase my drinking. I definitely feel that drinking allowed me to actually “fit in” and not feel like a perpetual outsider. And for better or worse, this definitely made me enjoy college more. Reading posts like this makes me love SM. I never really thought about desi-drinking in the college situation, though I’ve wondered about my youngest cousins who just got to college and how they’re handling it.
we should be careful about drinking like whites. size and metabolic biases matter. east asians can get drunk much quicker than europeans last i checked even controlling for size, and i think browns are somewhere between east asians and whites on this (northern europeans tend to have more issues with alcoholism than southern europeans too, part of it metabolism and part of it culture).
Nala makes some good points, but I would have to confess that I see a lot of myself in the desis described in the study–it’s eerily accurate. My parents don’t drink, & I started in college for some of those same reasons–i.e., to socialize, broadly speaking. I don’t feel bad about it, but cert. alcohol can lead to a host of problems–OTOH, most high-income countries seem to drink a lot–e.g., Japan, Korea, Germany, US.
It’s so weird that “higher education” in this country is associated with “partying”.
Wow, I am so shocked by this survey. I am amazed that in this day and age, brown kids are shocked to find other brown kids drinking? REALLY? I too went to college saying that I wasn’t going to drink, that I wasn’t interested. I never drank in high school. And what do you know? The first week I went to a frat party and got drunk on Nasty Lite. I am one of the few people I know that did not drink in high school brown or not. However, I was by no means shocked by the amount of drinking by brown people. I think this could be due to a few factors. One, I have an older sister and heard about her partying and going out in college. Two, alcohol is not taboo in my house. My dad allowed me to take sips from his scotch. Not that I liked it, I think I just enjoyed the fact that it was breaking the rules. When I’m home on the weekends, my mom and I always enjoy a glass of wine together. But I do realize that I’m the exception to the rule. I meet so many desis that are shocked that I drink in front of my parents. I really don’t see what the big deal is? I have to believe these kids were living very, very sheltered lives if they were shocked to see brown people drink. Granted I didn’t go to a school that had many brown people when I was there, GO AGS!, but it never surprised me to see them drink.
my first drinking experience was unuual – it was not at a party. i did not drink my first year of college. then my 2nd year, some friends invited me to watch an a few episodes of “Coupling”, a show i had not seen before. they got some bacardi and man, was that fun. i remember feeling perfectly fine until i got up, when i had problems balancing. but i quickly got a hold of it, and got back to my dorm where my roomate and his girlfriend were watching aladdin. it was magical.
When I used to come home from college my dad tried to convince me to have a glass of vodka and then offered to play a game of chess. His intentions were two-fold. First, he wanted to see how quickly I’d accept the vodka. Second, he wanted to get me drunk so that he’d be able to check my king with greater ease, proving that a college edumacation didn’t make me all smart.
I’m in college right now, and I really never had any inclination towards drinking at all before, but it became much more acceptable once I got to college. Although not required, it does get a little awkward to be the only non-drinking person at a party. And especially around recently uninhibited and seemingly more experienced brown people. Overall, I’d say that a bit of drinking is harmless but binge drinking is shallow and… gross.
Also, I’m really surprised at how unaware my parents are to this whole situation of desi kids actually drinking and partying. I was trying to convince my dad that indian kids here party just as much as the others (not me included, of course ;)) and he wouldn’t believe me! “No, the Indian kids too?!”
Most of the desis at my old high school drank. The ones who didn’t were “fobs” or not part of the extremely clique-y desi in-group. I’m honestly not surprised at this report.
i don’t drink often, i just sort of dabble in it.
but priya–i noticed the same thing about my parents too. anytime anyone brings up the topic of drugs/alcohol, they are extremely surprised if an indian participates in those activities. they’re quite oblivious to what actually goes on.
I’m an undergrad right now at V.Tech, straight from the desh. I started drinking right before entering college. Here, not a lot of desis are teetotallers. All my undergrad friends drink and weekends generally mean atleast a bottle of liquor per person down. Other Desi freshman generally abstain from drinking for atleast a month or so before they cave in to the pressure.
Also, desis with awesome GPA’s here tend to drink a lot, and it apparently doesn’t affect their grades. I don’t know if this is local or pervasive everywhere.
Anyhow, I think the general trend for all desi freshmen on my campus is:
1) If they started drinking before college, they will continue at the same pace, and it hardly affects their grades. 2) If they started drinking right after entering college, their grades suffer if they start drinking regularly.
The real smart ones (Top of the class in school. And by school I mean Indian school) do whatever – drinking, partying, drugs – but never drop their perfect grades, and Tech seems to have a lot of those.
Addendum to previous post:
There’s not a whole lot of undergrads fob chicks here at Tech. In fact, not a whole lot of any other foreign chicks here. So us poor desis gotta drink to score some.
Oh and as an amendment to my post, I entered college 13 years ago!
And even back then I would tell my parents about going to bars and drinking. I really can’t get over all this shock and surprise my parents and kids alike that brown kids drink. I have to say that my Mom never allowed us to drink in front of her before we were 21. But my dad got his Master’s here and drank in college. The fact that he went to school in Colorado and they sold beer in the cafeteria and Coors was a major sponsor probably helped. So I’m assuming that many of the brown kids of this generation probably had parents that went to college here and saw the partying scene, so why are they so shocked?!!? I’m shocked they are schocked!
This is probably an American phenomenon. I know most Canadian desis drink like fishes – well those of us who did our high school here anyway. You hit any club in TO or any university town and the drunkest guys are probably the brown ones. And desi girls are probably the same. Maybe cuz we’re more assimilated? or the South Asian families are more liberal here than the states?
heh. yeah. the “if you’re with other brown people, you’re probably prepping for the spelling bee!” attitude. i remember once in high school (at a time when i was very shy) my mom asked me why i wasn’t going with some other brown girls my age to a party, and of course i couldn’t tell her it was because i didn’t have a fake ID like they did. she was upset with me for being ‘anti-social,’ heh. jeezus, i know some brown kids that drank their parents’ liquor!, in their parents’ house!, while their parents were at home!
BadIndianGirl, your shock at the shock is hilarious. 😛
meant to close that tag
I’m waiting for some DBD to comment how confused, naive, unsophisticated, and stuck in ancient India we ABDs are. But this (admittedly poor) study actually resonates with me.
My experiences….I was an undergrad in the early 90s…both my parents drank socially, and I would occasionally take small sips of my dad’s drinks from the time I was a small kid…but nothing major. I didn’t really drink in high school, and it wasn’t until freshman year (college) that I had my first experience with getting wasted on alcohol. Since then, binge drinking with friends has been a regular occurance…but other than that I never drink. If there’s no good occasion to do so, I might not have even a single drink for months.
Back in my day (I’m sure things have changed) I think there was a real big difference between desi college freshman and non-desi freshman (at least for the first few weeks/months of the semester, after that things evened out). For example, most of us desis were still virgins when we entered college (although that status changed very quickly for most), whereas probably only a small minority of white kids were. College was the first real hard-core partying that many of us partook in. And I do recall in the beginning being amazed that the Indian kids were partying so hard, since that wasn’t my high school image of Indian kids. I don’t think you can discount our home environments as being a huge factor in why we were so different. Up to and including high school, the emphasis was on school and getting into college, period. There was no dating allowed, and limited partying (before any one accuses me of speaking for all ABDs, let me clarify these are my anecdotal experiences and nothing more, and they pertain to kids in the early 90s from homes with educated/professional parents). The freedom of college was really something it took some time to get used to.
Tangentially, the other major topic we could discuss that comes off of this topic…I think for a lot of desis, high school was a time when you might have been the only (or one of a very few) Indian kid in your class or even your school. It made you develop various attitudes and coping mechanisms towards your Indian side (usually to try to ignore or downplay it). Suddenly though, you’d get to college, and you might find hundreds of desis all around you…in my college, a HUGE desi clique formed almost in the first week or two…all ABDs…and on Fri/Sat night you’d see like 50 Indian kids walking down the street heading to a party. Within these cliques, an embrace of certain aspects of desi life and shared culture were allowed to be expressed…finally you were with other American people who were Indian at the same time, and had childhood experiences that paralleled yours, and had a lot of the same cultural references.
The relationship between ABDs and DBDs in college is another thing that volumes could be written about.
What I really want to know about is brown college kids’ sex lives. Is it as good as those of Indians (in India) or Nigerians or Mexicans??
Amitabh, I think this is a really good point. I would think many desi immigrant parents have a harder time ‘letting go’ of their children, because that’s a family dynamic different from what they’re used to (e.g. my mother lived with her parents until moving to the U.S.) – something that American parents also have trouble with, but deal with at an earlier age, like around high school time. But if your kids are going away to college, that necessitates some ‘letting go.’
would love to hear more on the said topic
Binge Drinking was not very common in the Desh although many men had a ‘small’ by 15. Yeah kinda young but it was considered a part of growing up. I dont suppose binge drinking is common now although more women drink now.
Never really understood the fascination for binge drinking.
From my experience the same happens in India if you go to college outside your hometown usually by the end of first year you start drinking. Believe me most DBD are heavy drinkers.When you start your job that is when parents are informed.
Is this because co-workers rat you out then, or because you then have the “clout” to tell them? I’m curious because my parents still don’t know I drink (heh–that is no doubt because I am an insecure loser).
From my experience the same happens in India if you go to college outside your hometown usually by the end of first year you start drinking.
That is true, in fact, a lot of kids in India start smoking and drinking by high school, since there is no legal enforcement on underage drinking. In villages, people drink moonshine also, and there are deaths by it sometimes. Smoking in Asia and Africa is very high. Beer in India has higher alcoholic content. If you went to KLDAV College in Sakuti Danda, guys are mostly interested in getting drunk, as classes, etc. are hardly regularly held.
You walk into IITs, Delhi U., Bombay U. (all primier Unis of India), you see a lot of butter chicken, drinking, marathon porn viewing parties. Youth festivals @ IITs, BITs, Stephen’s College are non-stop partying***.
Now let’s come to Cornell…….DBDs and ABDs at the undergraduate level used to team up pretty fast, and party together. Invariably (not always), a DBD from Desh at the undergraduate level at a school like Cornell (to afford that tuition from India, and with minimal or no financial aid – as federal student loans are for citizens, and permanent residents) are very rich, and have expensive tastes. Often, they became the lead persons. As a whole, Cornell is not a party schools, as State schools or even Stanford is. Cornell has the highest student suicide rate.
At graduate level in Cornell, it is an entirely different story (what I described in para above).
*** Even at IITs, once you get in, they is not too much pressure, therefore, it has more partying than its equivalents (comparable Uni. like MIT, Harvard) in States. Sure mixing of opposite sexes is not that prevalent or more awkward, but places like IIT hardly have (very few) female students, and that more has to do within Indian social culture also. But in Xavier’s College or Stephen’s College, I think partying is even harder since it has only yearly exams more on rote, no regular homeworks, quizzes, etc. – something Rang de Basanti even showed.
I don’t drink other than rare occasions to taste a little bit out of curiosity. I have never been drunk. But I wouldn’t feel odd to tell my parents that I drink if i wanted to. The same with dating. In college, i used to go to frat parties for other reasons.
This is worth its weight in gold the next time my moms tries to set me up with a Stephanian co-ed!!
You have to remember………
Most of the parents of the ABD kids here were/ are nerds. That is why they studied hard, took GREs, went through the immigration sieve.
I have a friend (he is a Brit who even worked in USA) who spent quite a bit of time in China. His first order observation was that they were lot of cool kids in China as opposed to what he had met in UK/ USA, since only the studious ones tend (or even try) to make it to immigration process. Manish Vij at Ultrabrown (former Sepia Mutiny man) touched this very eloquently a month ago, as he spent nearly a year in Mumbai last year.
Kush,
Yeah–too true. Will check out the Vij post–thanks.
Yeah, I agree that the students that go to the bars on mondays and stuff are wasting money. During the semester one should only be partying on weekends. You have all summer and spring/winter break party on weekdays.
rob,
Here is a link to Manish’s article.
His last para sums it up:
Here is a link to Manish’s article.
I am a DBD guy (went to an IIT and now in grad school here), and I tasted alcohol for the first time in my freshman year. Since then I have been somewhat of a regular drinker, and I really do believe that alcohol helps you come over certain inhibitions and bond really well with your peer group. However, I come from a family that looks down upon drinking very strongly and there was quite a ruckus when they first discovered that I drink. I really couldn’t impress upon then that drinking is (mostly) harmless – so my solution was to agree to not drink and just start lying to them when they would later ask me if I have indeed stopped. Although this has proved very convenient, of late it has started bothering me that I can’t be open to my parents. Any one else in the same boat, or have any thoughts on this ?
Any one else in the same boat, or have any thoughts on this ?
Not exactly my mom knows i drink whenever she calls from india she usually tells me to be moderate in my drinking, she knows its no point asking me to stop ( she stopped that when i entered college in india).
getting into a top university in the US usually requires one to have participated in sports, and to have a balance between high verbal and analytical skills. theres definitely some nerd lineage in most of these cornell desi kids, but its been bred woth some all-american well-rounded over acheiverness which requires one to have some aggressive qualities. as far as the comments about people being dumb for drinking on weekdays, i doubt at that point they are doing it to be cool. they may just be self-medicating their depression or angst. regarding driniking culture in india, with the middle class, although girls are increasingly hanging out with the guys and drinking, most of those girls are close friends or ur buddy’s girlfriend. there is no hookup scene really where there is loud music and everyone is getting f*d up and ur talking to some girl you dont even know. as far as night clubs are concerned, they’re expensive and most people dont go there to meet new people, but to hang out with people they already know in a more stimulating environment. rarely see people throwing up over here, whereas in the states it was expected that it was someones turn to that night. on the other hand, drinkers in india imbibe very frequently and without hesitation because they know their “quota”.
Oh dear. Whenever I’ve read about my alma mater on SM, it’s been in a rather negative light (I think the last Cornell-related post was about the Cornell American and the trash they publish). By the way, Cornell does not have the highest suicide rate. It’s just that the manner people choose to end their lives — jumping into the gorges — is more dramatic than what students in other universities tend to do, so people hear about it more, and then say stupid things like “try not to kill yourself!”
But there is indeed A Lot of drinking that goes on at Cornell. Hey, they even have a wine-tasting class, so you can get buzzed in a lecture hall. There weren’t that many desi undergrads when I was there…there were enough that you’d know them all by face at least (and Facebook had just started my junior year, so some people literally knew others only by profile alone). The ABDs didn’t really hang out with the DBDs (who were mostly grad students…the few undergrad DBDs I knew wanted little to do with the ABDs). Undergrad brown folk had a pretty good idea then of who the binge drinkers were, and who abstained. It didn’t stop people from having good times though, as far as I could tell. I had desi friends who refused to drink, they were happy, and people respected their choices. There were many smaller factions within the already not-so-large brown population, so it wasn’t difficult to fit in. Granted, these are just my observations from three years ago.
I only drank if I had something to celebrate, and even then it wasn’t much — I have a low tolerance for alcohol and never built it up. My parents have a glass or two of wine with dinner every once in a while, so the idea of my having a drink on occasion didn’t faze them.
Nala,
In my country, Thursday night is party night. Wednesday often as well, but rarely Friday. I often go for social drinks even on Mondays. All this and most of my friends still manage to turn up for lectures at 9 AM. Although in the real hardcore ‘corps’ fraternities the binge drinking is much worse and people hardly turn up for college at all. Most of the other desis of my age that I know don’t drink, though I know very few desis. Drinking allows for more social integration. I didn’t drink when I started college, but I slowly got into the habit and it can be a great stress reliever. I’m not suprised that other brown kids drink; I do, and my dad quite likes his beers, so it wasn’t a taboo in our house.
I didn’t start drinking until I was 21. Part of that was because I just didn’t think that it was worth it to get snapped up for underage consumption and then have to explain to the khaandaan as a whole why I was putting away cosmos. But many of the desis I knew in college were alcoholics waiting to happen, and this was despite a lack of frats etc.
I can drink entire countries under an assortment of tables now though, brown-person-genes be damned 😉
This is quite a strange survey. I imagine that if Punjabi students were interviewed it would be a different response. Apart from very religious Sikhs, Punjabi culture, especially in the diaspora, is a drinking culture.
Forgot to add also, in my country 16 is the legal drinking age. So no need to arrange fake IDs in college.
It’s true that there was a big difference in the parents’ drinking depending on regional/religious origin in the sub-continent. The funny thing is that Punjabi Muslims partied just as hard as anyone else in college. That being said, some of the hardest partiers I knew were Gujarati Jains. They did EVERYTHING…drank, had sex, smoked pot…oh but you can’t eat meat!
Bottom line…college is a weird place.
and from everything I’ve heard, Cornell is a big drinking school (fraternity-style, there’s a desi frat and a desi sorority there I believe) in general.
It is, but not as big as IC (Ithaca College) a meaningful parallel is the relationship of Boston U. To Boston College. As for desi frats and sororities at Cornell, not sure if they’re recognized and have a charter. IND is up in SUNY Binghamton. There’s a desi frat at UT Austin that I dont remember the name of.
Abhi @ 12: Son, I do not have to offer you, and never did offer you Vodka (or for that matter anything)to beat you at chess. Untill recently, as you know, I was having a glass of red wine with dinner every night for last 30 years or so. As they say Wealth, Women and Wine – in moderation – are beneficial to one’s health. When I went to school in US – back in late 60s – we played poker all night, with a six pack beer for each player. That’s about it. Once in a while at a party, when liquor was free, Desi’s were spotted with “Scotch” in their hand trying to impress “white” girls. Oh those were the days !! Kush @ 31: I beg your pardon. No I was never, and am not a nerd. Yes I studied hard, took TOEFL and GRE and got my “Green Card” strictly based on acedemic merits (they called it third preference in those days). Being acedemically smart has very little to do with consumption of (or lack of)alcohol. On a lighter note, they tell me that Lord Shiva (Mahadev) was a known addict, and would consume “Bhaang” on a regular basis. He could have done this to impress Parvati ! who knows ?
I think i was the only kid in college that wasnt drinking. (large urban university in the late 90’s). probably did put a damper on my social life, but i didnt like how drunk people behaved, so i didnt care.
This quote from a college friend uttered circa 1991 stands out in my memory: “Can’t have a subcontinental party without alcohol!”
I was underage thru out undergrad so my drinking was kept at a bare minimum level. To this day, excessive drinking turns me off and it’s nearly impossible to meet 30something desis in the NYC area who abstain or know their limits.
I think ive only really met one other person who doesnt drink who isnt an ultra religious muslim.
My first proper encounter with the ol’ alcohol (proper meaning, going all the way, passing out, getting kicked out and ending up in casualty) was my first day of university. Having an incredibly beautiful, Keith Sweat loving, Punjabi housemate, I was up for anything to impress. Silly me for thinking drinking was the way forward. But when she offers you a drink, “yeah sure†become the only two words you need to know 🙂
Anyway she offered vodka and coke, and I said vodka straight would be cool. Now I may be love struck but my taste buds have standards so I did take the coke after. Well after a few of those, her stories of Birmingham sounded apocalyptic (I think she was talking about missing her dog)
You have to understand the story gets a little hazy from now on 🙂
Anyway we left to go to a beach party in derby, dressed in blinding orange shorts, Hawaiian shirt, and a t-shirt with Bart Simpson on it. So we get to this Australian bar for the beach party (as far away from a real beach as possible in England) and folk start drinking cocktails, and having a sweet tooth, they tasted really nice!
Lots of drinks later, I wake up the next morning feeling like I have ankle weights for a head band and my friend telling me that I got kicked out of the bar by two of the bouncers who were part of the derby American football team (American football in the east midlands?), getting smacked in the face leaving a dirty bleeding gash, left passed out on a park bench, ending up having a housemate who I only knew for 2 1/2 hours taking me to casualty. According to him the only thing I was worried about was losing my keys.
I made it for the 9.00am class that day, Punjabi, keith sweat loving girl became a very cool friend, and I learnt my first true lesson in life, “when you feel a little tipsy, have one more john and coke and enjoy the rest of the night safelyâ€. But that’s just me. 🙂