Go Yeast, Young Man!(Indians in America)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)

Ever since Christopher Columbus set out for India and discovered America, his intended destination has remained curiously disconnected from the land of Manifest Destiny. It is only in recent years that this has begun to change with a wave of immigrants from the Subcontinent, many of whom first entered the United States as students on scholarships. Holidaying in south India with my 18-year-old twin sons this August, I realized how far this process has gone--and how far it still has to go.

Demographic projections suggest that the next U.S. Census will find more Indian-Americans than American Indians. Any doubts I might have had about these numbers were dispelled at a dinner party I attended in the textile town of Coimbatore--at just over a million inhabitants, one of India's less substantial urban centers. (Coimbatore is a prosperous city but not quite Mumbai, as I discovered when the global roaming facility on my U.S. mobile phone failed to work.) About 20 couples gathered on the manicured lawns of the British-era Coimbatore Club, all doctors, engineers and business people. Amid the chitchat, it abruptly dawned on me that every single guest had a child attending school in the United States. Several had two or more. The sole exception was a couple whose daughter was too young for college. She was going to take the SATs next year.

When I was admitted to an American graduate school in 1975, I was one of three students from my university class of more than 300 who made the journey to America. Already, though, my counterparts at India's elite technological universities and engineering colleges had begun to snap up the fellowships that American munificence (and an ever-growing economy) provided. They went on to form the creative backbone of the U.S. information revolution--as it was then quaintly called-- fertilizing Silicon Valley with their quick minds and founding billion- dollar companies that changed the way Americans live. (Vinod Dham, to name but one, designed Intel's Pentium chip; another devised Hotmail.) Their success transformed the image of their homeland and its people. To the American mind, the stereotypical Indian is no longer a snake charmer but a software techie; in corporate and academic recruiting offices, the Indian Institutes of Technology are accorded the same reverence that was once reserved for MIT and Caltech. For an aspiring Indian, nothing succeeds like the success of your compatriots. Today, an Indian student with decent ...