Thought I’d forward out this old-ish story where folks interviewed a series of cab drivers in NYC to find out about their lifestyles, motivations, etc. – A World Connected – Cabdriver Confessions

At aWorldConnected, we asked ourselves what kinds of people have the most intriguing perspectives on globalization? And what do they see? To begin to answer this question, we sent our cameras to New York City and talked to cab drivers. All the cabbies we spoke to grew up in developing countries and immigrated to the United States. In making these risky, life-changing decisions, they left behind family, friends, and a familiar culture for the chance at a better life.

Of course, several of the folks were desi –

Kawsar from Bangladesh Making money in America has opened up new opportunities for this driver. Hop in for a ride as he tells his story.

An interesting multi-part article @ The India Times about the life of Desi Gen-X.

There’s the techie who can’t get da ladies –

After having spent his formative years in an all-guys boarding school, Brijesh Pandit thought that he would get lucky with girls when he enrolled himself in college. However, much to his dismay, the ratio in his engineering college in Manipal was 1:10.

Ruchita Kumar, a single web designer, says that techies are a strict no-no for her. Ask her why and she replies with a smile,” belonging to the industry myself, I don’t find any of my techie comrades exciting. Some of them can be really boring, going on hours at end about Linux and Open Source,” she complains.

For software engineer Ambarish Sen Sharma, life has not been easy. After spending six years in Sacramento, the 34-year-oldÂ’s Sundays are now devoted to checking out prospective brides with his family. Although he is not too keen on an arranged marriage, there does not seem any other option available to him.

The “want it all” career girl –

A workaholic colleague at the next cubicle, a ‘coming soon’ hike, a loving boyfriend , a new music system-DVD-VCD player, the Da Vinci code – these are just a few things that keeps Ameeta Singh going. For the 27-year-old art director in an international advertising agency, life is about striking the right balance.

The emasculated older guy –

Mohan Ojha, 33, realized this when his manager retired and he became answerable to his 28-year-old boss. For Ojha things got complicated further when it turned out that his superior was a woman and his junior from B-school.

The country bumpkin who goes to the big city–

“I never used to wear branded clothes or drink mineral water when I stayed in Agra. I was also very stuck up on pre-marital sex and could never identify with women who smoked or drank. Call me old-fashioned, but after living for 2 years in Dallas, my attitude changed,” Animesh Dutta, US-returned programmer, said.

Muy interesante – India-made scooters help bring down Lanka suicide rate : HindustanTimes.com.

Three wheelers made in India have played a silent but a very critical role in bringing down the appallingly high suicide rate in Sri Lanka, experts say.

But this has steadily come down over the years, with 2002 recording 23.8 suicides per 100,000 people, the lowest so far.

“Almost every fair sized habitation in Sri Lanka now has four or five Bajaj three wheelers which enable quick and timely transfer of the suicide cases to the nearest hospital,” said Manisha Wickramanayake, a staffer at the suicide prevention organisation Sumithrayo.

Unintended consequences rule. Continue reading →

The name of a new museum in Washington, D.C. perpetuates a historical mistake. In the 21st century, the Smithsonian still saw fit to call it the National Museum of the American Indian. In a farcical juxtaposition, even the hometown paper calls them Native Americans throughout the very same story.

Researching desis in the U.S. has always been a pain because the injection of American Indian in search results forces you to use ever more tortured qualifiers like East Indian (which really means Bengali, Bihari, Oriya, Assamese…), Asian Indian, Indian-American, South Asian and South Asian American. This museum’s name just makes it worse. (I suppose it’s too late to ask the West Indies to choose a new moniker.)

The sexy, curvy new museum sits on the National Mall between the Capitol and the spectacular aerospace museum.

Razib plugs common desi names into Wedding Channel and comes up with a 38% outmarriage rate for second-gen desis, which he says confirms his belief that:

the first Asian Indian generations are in the same statistical ball-park as Japanese who have been resident in the United States for 100 years!

A 38% outmarriage estimate strikes me as inaccurately high due to least two forms of sampling bias. One is obvious, online wedding registries disproportionately draw from people of higher socioeconomic status. The other is less so: it samples outmarriage from age groups at the leading edge of population cohort and subculture formation.

Californian Sikhs in the early 1900s outmarried at a near-100% rate because they were barred from bringing over Sikh wives. Similarly, older second-gen desis met fewer desis in college and grad school because there weren’t many others in their cohort. And they didn’t have as thriving a popular subculture and identity within the U.S. to play with, as Vinod ably demonstrated:

We were at the bleeding edge of the Desi demographic wedge — the children of the first wave of Indian professional parents… demography has provided a critical mass of other Desi’s… The turning point here was somewhere around my senior year in college (1995)… 5-10 years of additional Desi penetration into America has made all the difference and provides them with a college experience quite distinct from mine… Desi is now a “3rd culture” that’s neither mainstream American nor FOB Indian.

The outmarriage rate will most likely follow a trinomial path where it reverses twice: high in the beginning, sharply lower as cohort size increases, and then gradually increasing as assimilation progresses. Razib notes but then glosses over this argument:

there are likely to be more South Asian partners on the market than there were for the children of the late 60s to early 80s…

Continue reading →

Sigh. This editorial cartoon by Pat Oliphant (9/8/04) just ran in the New York Times and the Washington Post, among other papers. Using an emaciated, half-naked beggar sitting next to a cow to represent Indian high tech: it’s Temple of Doom all over again (thanks, S.K.).

Let Universal Press Syndicate know how you feel: content@uclick.com. Takes only 30 seconds. I just wrote in.

For a funny, thinly-disguised take on outsourcing, check out ‘Dilbert’ on the fictional country of Elbonia.

Frequent SM commentor Godless Capitalist / “GC” posts over @ GNXP – How the Asians became White.

I first noticed this effect 10 years ago, at a party where a friend of mine commented that the guests were all white. I responded by mentioning about a dozen Asians; oh, she said, that’s right, but you know what I mean. At a recent UCLA conference I attended, two speakers complained that everyone on the panel was white, without even realizing that one of the speakers was ethnically Chinese, and another was an Asian Indian with skin darker than that of many American blacks…

If true, it would leave many an aspiring desi race/ethnic activist unemployed….

The Maharashtra government has extended its caste hiring quotas into the booming private sector. Because if you happen across an avian that lays ovoids of gold, the first thing to do is to throttle her.

“We’ve already been suffering under many constraints, like socialist economic planning and labour restrictions,” says Rahul Bajaj, chairman of Bajaj Auto, the world’s largest manufacturer of scooters and motorcycles and one of India’s largest companies. “If we implement reservations, we’ll have no way to become internationally competitive.”

It’s another example of legacy capture, where programs intended to be temporary are never discontinued. The system adjusts to the new baseline, the constituencies sucking on the taxpayer teat spend part of the windfall on lobbying, and the subsidies are only ever expanded (e.g. U.S. timber subsidies, weapons programs that the Pentagon doesn’t want but can’t cancel):

Many say the constitution intended reservations as a temporary measure. But the rising political clout of low-caste Indians (who make up some 50% of the population) prevented the programme from being discontinued. Instead, it was expanded to include Indians from lower-middle positions in the caste hierarchy… Singh’s reforms made a mockery of the affirmative-action policy, entitling over 90% of the population in some states to reserved jobs.

Continue reading →

Over the past three years I have heard the term “Thugs” used countless times in American politics, especially by our leaders:

Like Bush here:

The world changed on a terrible September morning. And since that day we have changed the world. Before September the 11th, Afghanistan served as the home base of al-Qaida, which trained and deployed thousands of killers to set up terror cells around the world, including our country. Today, Afghanistan is a rising democracy. (Applause.) Afghanistan is an ally in the war against these thugs. (Applause.) Many young girls now go to school in Afghanistan for the first time. (Applause.) Afghanistan is becoming free, and America and the world are safer for it. (Applause.)

or here:

At every stage of this process, before and after the transition to Iraqi sovereignty, the enemy is likely to be active and brutal. They know the stakes as well as we do. But our coalition is prepared, our will is strong, and neither Iraq’s new leadership nor the United States will be intimidated by thugs and assassins.

Continue reading →

Second-gen U.S. desis sometimes compete for business also outsourced to desis in India and Pakistan. And the second gen are not guaranteed to be as professionally hardcore and driven as either their parents or new desi immigrants their age. But we’re not the only community with these tensions: the New York Times reports that that American blacks are also competing with African immigrants:

“These are very aggressive people who are coming here,” said Dr. Austin, who is calling for a frank dialogue between native-born and foreign-born blacks. “I don’t berate immigrants for that; they have given up a lot to get here. But we’re going to be in competition with them. We have to be honest about it. That is one of the dividing lines.”…

By 2000, foreign-born blacks constituted 30 percent of the blacks in New York City, 28 percent of the blacks in Boston and about a quarter here in Montgomery County, Md… Bobby Austin, an administrator at the University of the District of Columbia who attended the meeting in Washington, said he understood why some blacks were offended when Mr. Kamus claimed an African-American identity. Dr. Austin said some people feared that black immigrants and their children would snatch up the hard-won opportunities made possible by the civil rights movement…

In New York City, for example, and this is strictly in my humble opinion, the 1st-gen desis who’ve made it through the immigration strainer are much more hardcore on average than U.S.-born desis of the same age. That’s due to the requirements of U.S. immigration law as well as the financial, familial and cultural hardships of emigration. Continue reading →