Come, sit, drink chai and relax, S. Asian Americans....

The New Republic, which this goofy Indian with his perpetual five o'clock shadow and known weakness for strong coffee must confess is his favourite news magazine, features an interesting, timely and germane article on the political situation of desis in 2005.

We have been coming here since the nineteenth century, originally, as labourers from The British Empire, and then, in the 1950's, as skilled immigrants. We have been working hard to establish ourselves, largely keeping out of the radar, fearing backlash and resentment against immigrants. Does this story sound familiar? It should. It's the classic story of every major ethnic or religious immigrant group to the United State of America. Whether it's the Irish, Italians, Germans, Eastern European Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans etc., we've all followed the same pattern of arriving here, clustering in ethnic communities and building ourselves into financial success and social acceptability.

Indian Americans have been so pre-occupied with achieving financial success as the means to acheiving social acceptability that we joke that there are only four acceptable careers for young adults entering college: medicine, computer science, business and natural sciences. A recent addition, of course, is law, but only because we need immigration lawyers to help get our family members here. The generation of people who emigrated to the United States is still largely incredulous of their financial and social success, which is understandable. When you leave behind a country characterised by poverty, disease and religious conflict, those experiences will always stick with you. No matter how rich someone may become, he will always remember the penury of his childhood. This has resulted in some behaviour patterns that some find humourous, but in which I see a world of pathos. How many of us have laughed at our parents, the wildly rich doctors, who go out to eat and order food based entirely upon whatever happens to be cheapest on the menu? How many of us have laughed at our aunts and uncles who will spend hours driving and quite a bit of money on gas to drive to an outlet mall to save three dollars on the cost of a shirt? Do we laugh at our grandparents, who are still shocked at the idea of spending money on disposable diapers, rather than using reusable linens at a lower cost? I will admit that I have, I do and I shall probably continue to laugh at such behaviours, but as I get older, I feel more of an empathy with these people.

And yet, now, we stand as the most wildly successful immigrant community in the history of the United States. We face certain discriminations and problems today, but compared to what Jews, Irish, Chinese and Japanese immigrants earlier in the country's history faced, these seem a bit smaller by comparison. Perhaps as immigrants we have benefitted from the march of progress creating the liberal state that we know today coinciding with the beginnings of our immigration. It is hard to imagine businesses refusing to serve desis on religious grounds, but that's what Jews experienced up until the twentieth century. If anyone reading this is from Houston, I'm sure that you're familiar with Meierland's history: a community created because no one wanted Jews as their neighbours, and so no one would sell them houses. These are things in my country's history that shame me, and yet, also inspire me. For while I am horrified by the nakedly ignorant prejudice that went into them, I see that they have been left behind, and the fact that we've moved beyond them gives me hope. Desis have acheived the same success as these other immigrant groups far more quickly than they ever did, but mostly due to the fact that we never faced the same barriers here that these other groups did.

Perhaps it is the lack of barriers that we've faced together as a community that keeps us a largely disparate group of people, unaware of our political power. We've never had to act in concert to accomplish goals that would benefit our community, and so all that we have are memories of the Quit India Movement to inspire us. It never ceases to amaze me when I come across desis who think that politics are irrelevant, or don't vote.

Desis For Texas is proud to be on the forefront of bringing these successful people and their children, with all their foibles, funny accents and knock-off perfumes and colognes, into the political process. Bravo to The New Republic for an article that brought some thoughts to this Indian's mind as he sipped his morning coffee on a Friday.

Dheeraj