Dear Friends;
The New York Times has the following feature in its newly started blog
India Ink Please go through its first offer:
-bhuban
SEPTEMBER 12, 2011, 10:33 AM
From Sikhs and Cheese to Patels and Motels
By VIKAS BAJAJ
That Indians have migrated far and wide for economic opportunities is
well known. Yet, stories about specific communities of Indians making a
home in a distant part of the world seem to have an enduring appeal.
Last week, for instance, Twitter and Facebook accounts among readers in
India and across the diaspora were abuzz after The New York Times
published this story about a community of Sikhs who have migrated to
northern Italy to work in its dairies.
Samuele Pellecchia for the International Herald TribuneKuluant Singh
during his work shift in the milking room at a farm in San Bassano,
Italy.
The story was only the latest in a series of such stories about the
various ethnic Indian communities found in virtually all big, and many
small, countries. The Times wrote about the Sikhs of Canada in this
2000 article. And let’s not stop at Sikhs. Tunku Varadarajan, the
American journalist who himself was born in India, wrote about the
Gujaratis who dominate the motel business in much of the United States
in this long 1999 article in The New York Times Sunday Magazine.
Outside the Times, I found this Associated Press article from 2009
about the various Indian communities – among them Sikhs, Gujaratis and
Tamils — in Bangkok, Thailand, which is where I lived from age 6 to 17.
That piece said that “an estimated 140,000 of the city’s 10-plus
million residents have roots in modern India.”
Richard Perry/The New York TimesNavratri festival celebrations in
Edison, New Jersey, USA in 2006.
It’s not just journalists who are fascinated with Indian migrants.
Writers like Amitav Ghosh — “Sea of Poppies” — have written many books
on the subject and scholars have studied this migration extensively.
The Indian diaspora is large in absolute terms – the government
estimates it at 25 million people – but is just a tiny fraction of the
overall Indian population of 1.2 billion. So, why are we so fascinated
with Indian immigrants?
One explanation is purely economic: India receives more money in
remittances from its migrant population — about $53 billion in the last
fiscal year, or 3 percent of the gross domestic product – than any
other country in the world, according to the World Bank.
Darryl Dyck/Associated PressA Sikh motorcycle group in a 9/11 memorial
in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada on Sunday.
Immigrants have also become important cultural ambassadors and
advocates for India, whether they have done so consciously or by their
simple presence in foreign countries. Some have described this as
India’s “soft power.”
Another plausible explanation is that many writers and readers like
feel-good — or conversely, tear-jerking — stories about migrants
because many of us have been migrants ourselves or have a relative or
close friend who is. We see ourselves in these stories. I know I do.
Perhaps, it is not surprising then that a new version of the old Indian
immigrant story has caught the attention of reporters and editors:
Indians are now returning to take advantage of the faster economic
growth here, particularly in the information technology industry.
The BBC did a piece on this phenomenon last year. The year before, my
colleague Heather Timmons wrote a piece that looked at the challenges
that returning Indians face here.
Over the weekend, I had tea with a 30-something Mumbaikar, who grew up
in India and went to college in the United States, who told me that he
and some of his friends were thinking about selling their south Mumbai
flats and moving to Los Angeles. By doing so, he said, they would cash
in on high home prices here and take advantage of the weak housing
market in California.
I imagine that over the coming years, there will be various
permutations of the Indian immigrant story. We, or at least some of us,
seem to be a restless lot.
India Ink is looking for tales of Indians far from home, working
unlikely jobs, keeping traditions in unusual ways. Send us your story
at IndiaInk@nytimes.c
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