Comment

The call of grandmotherhood had me winging across to Washington DC. As luck and irony would have it, one of the films screened, as we flew over the Atlantic Ocean, was Wes Anderson’s latest: The Darjeeling

Express. I had wanted to see it — about three ill-assorted American brothers seeking some sort of spiritual epiphany, looking for their missing mother living in a convent in some outpost of India.

They also wanted to evoke some sorely missing brotherly feeling as they made their way on the kitschy and occasionally surreal train chugging its way across what looked like Rajasthan.

But it was also the fact that exercising my mind at the time was a germ of an idea for a story about what was happening to the young desis, the second generation Indians whose parents had migrated to the United States for a better life, a shot at the American dream.

What epiphanies did they experience? What part American and what part desi did they feel? Did they actually worry about the who-am-I question that many of the travelers heading east were searching for answers to? Would they also end up looking for themselves in the old homeland?

And what was it like to be a person of colour post-9/11: being brown put you dangerously close to where all the bad guys were supposedly coming from.

Having grown up in Washington, my childhood memories of Indian families in the US are not flattering. Most spent weekends shopping (or talking about it) for whatever bits of the American dream (washing machines, television sets, etc) they could take back.

The first-wave Indians coming here to stay were only interested in accumulating all the material accoutrements of American dream, without attempting to become part of the mainstream. Home was elsewhere. Once across their thresholds, you could well be in Punjab, Gujarat or Tamil Nadu.

GenerationNext appears to be evolving in interesting — those I was able to talk to people living and working in and around DC.

The pejorative ABCD label (American born confused desi) is fading; the C has been dropped by an increasing number of second generation Indian-Americans.

They are an amalgamation of several cultures. Like Manpreet Singh Anand, 31, who wears a turban, speaks without an Indian accent and works on Capitol Hill.

Born and raised in Texas, he went to graduate school at UC Berkeley. He tells me, “I am more Punjabi than Indian and more Texan than American.”They can no longer be slotted as hyphenated Indian-Americans: there are more hues and nuances to the hybridisation taking place.

Anand and others like him don’t want to go down the well-trodden paths their parents did: engineers, doctors and academicians.

Many have turned away from pursuing the path paved with gold to the higher reaches of corporate America. Like Neal Katyal, a lawyer — brought up in the Chicago area, he is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and recently won the landmark Hamdan v Rumsfield case in the Supreme Court.

Then there are others who have gone down even more unexpected paths. Princeton graduate Rajiv Vinnakota chucked up a lucrative career as a management consultant to set up, along with a friend, the first urban public boarding school in the States. C

alled SEED (Schools for Educational Evolution and Development), it is widely appreciated and has changed the lives of scores of minority children by enabling them to go to college.Vinnakota wants to leave a better ‘social footprint’ — do something for the less fortunate in his country.

Many of the younger desis in America are no longer comfortable with the hyphenated identity of ‘Indian-American’.

Some are beginning to think of themselves as American of Indian origin — just like the Italians and the Irish before them whose ancestors left Europe for the new world.

I wonder how my born-in-the-USA grandchildren will label themselves.

Email:jain_madhu@hotmail.com