First we were thrown out of Indonesia, Cambodia, Vitenam, Myanmar and then we were thrown out of African countries like Uganda, South Africa, Kenya and now it is the turn of North America and Europe.

In Canada it will be Brampton, Mississauga and BC.

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http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article495461.ece?homepage=true


Will Indians face a backlash in the U.S.?
Pranay Gupte

There is a cultural defensiveness among many Indians, but they bring enterprise and energy to communities with their presence, and this works to everyone's benefit.

There has been increasing angst and teeth-gnashing among Indians in the United States this week over a tongue-in-cheek essay by columnist Joel Stein in the international newsweekly, Time. Mr. Stein ruefully talks about how his native Edison, a New Jersey community just across the Hudson River from New York City, has been transformed into a “Little India” — with the overpowering smells of Indian cuisine, the eclectic colours of Indian ethnicity, and the distinctive dialects of the subcontinent dominating what was once a largely Italian-American town.

The blogosphere has been ricocheting with rants against the writer, accusing him of prejudice or worse. Time's editors subsequently said that the magazine — whose circulation is just under four million — did not intend to offend Indians. I know Mr. Stein, and he's scarcely a racist; he has acknowledged that the presence of Indians has brought fresh prosperity and diversity to Edison. I am pretty sure that his piece was intended to be satirical, even if it wasn't especially felicitous. Columnists, after all, are paid to be provocative; engendering offence is sometimes one of those unintended consequences of the trade.

An Indian friend, who lives in East Asia, put a healthy perspective on Mr. Stein's article after I had e-mailed it to her. “I was aware somewhere that I ought to be insulted as this guy is saying mean things about my countrymen and culture — but the piece is written with so much humour and candour that I could not help but see his point,” she said. “I cannot help but see where he is coming from. It may not be balanced but brings out the feelings of so many. And somewhere along the line admits to being biased. I see why Time ran it!”

My own feeling is that Indians — especially those living and prospering abroad — often tend to be bereft of irony and a self-deprecating sense of humour; they are given to being far too readily offended as a tribe. It may not quite be a “Masada Complex” — a feeling of being under siege — but there's a cultural defensiveness that I have sensed among many Indians I have known since I first landed in the U.S. as a student.

Of course, there are now many more Indians in America since my initial arrival in 1967. When I visited the U.S. — now my adopted country — not long ago for a major class reunion at Brandeis University near Boston and Cambridge, it struck me that just about every second person on the streets seemed to be of Indian origin. In my home city of New York, the situation was no less different.

Surely, I thought, America — a nation of 307 million — must profit substantially from the presence of these Indians, of whom there are now more than 2.5 million, a tenth of the global Indian Diaspora. As if by serendipity, I came across a study showing that indeed America does benefit handsomely through the contributions of Indians, including businessmen, physicians, and high-technology entrepreneurs.

This study was jointly prepared by the India-U.S. World Affairs Institute of Washington, the Robert H. Smith School of Business of the University of Maryland, and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry; it revealed that Indians are not only the most affluent and most educated of the scores of ethnic communities in the melting pot that's the U.S., they are also rapidly becoming among the most significant investors in the American economy.

According to the report, 90 Indian companies made 127 greenfield investments worth $5.5 billion between 2004 and 2009, and created 16,576 jobs in the U.S. During the same period, 239 Indian companies made 372 acquisitions in the U.S., creating more than 40,000 jobs. The total value of 267 (of the 372) acquisitions was $21 billion, or $78.7 million per acquisition. A “greenfield investment” is a form of foreign direct investment where a parent company starts a new venture in a foreign country by constructing new operational facilities from the ground up.

The study says that the five industrial sectors in the U.S. that received the most greenfield investment were metals; software and information technology services; leisure and entertainment; industrial machinery, equipment and tools; and financial services. The sums poured into these sectors accounted for almost 80 per cent of total greenfield investment. New Jersey — the State in which Edison is located — has been one of the top recipients of Indian investment.

New Jersey schools and colleges also have among the largest number of the Indian students who come to the U.S. each year. Overall, there are an estimated 94,563 students from India whose net contribution to the U.S. economy was $2.39 billion, according to the study. In fact, students of Indian origin constitute 10 to 12 per cent of medical students entering U.S. schools, the new study says. Furthermore, there are about 50,000 physicians (and 15,000 medical students) of Indian heritage in the American cities, and in rural areas.

New Jersey has its share of the so-called “Patel motels” too. There are currently almost 10,000 Indian American owners of hotels/motels in the U.S., owning over 40 per cent of all hotels in the country and 39 per cent of all guest rooms; the study says they own more than 21,000 hotels with 1.8 million guest rooms and property valued at $129 billion. These Indian-owned facilities employ 578,600 workers.

The U.S. Census Bureau adds that there were 231,000 businesses owned by Indian Americans in 2002, which employed 615,000 workers and had revenues of over $89 billion. (The Census Bureau conducts the survey every five years, and the results of the 2007 survey will be available in a few days). A study led by Vivek Wadhwa for Duke University and the University of California, Berkeley, found that Indian immigrant entrepreneurs had founded more engineering and technology companies during 1995-2005 than immigrants from Britain, China, Japan, and Taiwan combined. Of all immigrant-founded companies, 26 per cent had Indian founders.

Which brings us back to Joel Stein's column and all the hullaballoo that it has generated. Edison, New Jersey, may not be a precursor of things to come — in other words, Indians are hardly about to demographically dominate small towns all across America; the country's immigration laws would work against that possibility. But Indians bring enterprise and energy to communities with their presence, and this works to everyone's benefit. They are largely anchored in their homespun culture, but they are also respectful of American mores and morals, and laws as well. They make the American tapestry more colourful, richer, and culturally more alive. They are living the American Dream, but in their own special Indian way. What's wrong with that?

(Pranay Gupte is a veteran international journalist and author. His forthcoming book is on India and the Middle East.)


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Sunny Leone a true Canadian DESI now back in India !.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1999416,00.html


My Own Private India
By Joel Stein Monday, Jul. 05, 2010

I am very much in favor of immigration everywhere in the U.S. except Edison, N.J. The mostly white suburban town I left when I graduated from high school in 1989 — the town that was called Menlo Park when Thomas Alva Edison set up shop there and was later renamed in his honor — has become home to one of the biggest Indian communities in the U.S., as familiar to people in India as how to instruct stupid Americans to reboot their Internet routers.

My town is totally unfamiliar to me. The Pizza Hut where my busboy friends stole pies for our drunken parties is now an Indian sweets shop with a completely inappropriate roof. The A&P I shoplifted from is now an Indian grocery. The multiplex where we snuck into R-rated movies now shows only Bollywood films and serves samosas. The Italian restaurant that my friends stole cash from as waiters is now Moghul, one of the most famous Indian restaurants in the country. There is an entire generation of white children in Edison who have nowhere to learn crime.


I never knew how a bunch of people half a world away chose a random town in New Jersey to populate. Were they from some Indian state that got made fun of by all the other Indian states and didn't want to give up that feeling? Are the malls in India that bad? Did we accidentally keep numbering our parkway exits all the way to Mumbai?

I called James W. Hughes, policy-school dean at Rutgers University, who explained that Lyndon Johnson's 1965 immigration law raised immigration caps for non-European countries. LBJ apparently had some weird relationship with Asians in which he liked both inviting them over and going over to Asia to kill them.

After the law passed, when I was a kid, a few engineers and doctors from Gujarat moved to Edison because of its proximity to AT&T, good schools and reasonably priced, if slightly deteriorating, post–WW II housing. For a while, we assumed all Indians were geniuses. Then, in the 1980s, the doctors and engineers brought over their merchant cousins, and we were no longer so sure about the genius thing. In the 1990s, the not-as-brilliant merchants brought their even-less-bright cousins, and we started to understand why India is so damn poor.

Eventually, there were enough Indians in Edison to change the culture. At which point my townsfolk started calling the new Edisonians "dot heads." One kid I knew in high school drove down an Indian-dense street yelling for its residents to "go home to India." In retrospect, I question just how good our schools were if "dot heads" was the best racist insult we could come up with for a group of people whose gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose.


Unlike some of my friends in the 1980s, I liked a lot of things about the way my town changed: far better restaurants, friends dorky enough to play Dungeons & Dragons with me, restaurant owners who didn't card us because all white people look old. But sometime after I left, the town became a maze of charmless Indian strip malls and housing developments. Whenever I go back, I feel what people in Arizona talk about: a sense of loss and anomie and disbelief that anyone can eat food that spicy.

To figure out why it bothered me so much, I talked to a friend of mine from high school, Jun Choi, who just finished a term as mayor of Edison. Choi said that part of what I don't like about the new Edison is the reduction of wealth, which probably would have been worse without the arrival of so many Indians, many of whom, fittingly for a town called Edison, are inventors and engineers. And no place is immune to change. In the 11 years I lived in Manhattan's Chelsea district, that area transformed from a place with gangs and hookers to a place with gays and transvestite hookers to a place with artists and no hookers to a place with rich families and, I'm guessing, mistresses who live a lot like hookers. As Choi pointed out, I was a participant in at least one of those changes. We left it at that.

Unlike previous waves of immigrants, who couldn't fly home or Skype with relatives, Edison's first Indian generation didn't quickly assimilate (and give their kids Western names). But if you look at the current Facebook photos of students at my old high school, J.P. Stevens, which would be very creepy of you, you'll see that, while the population seems at least half Indian, a lot of them look like the Italian Guidos I grew up with in the 1980s: gold chains, gelled hair, unbuttoned shirts. In fact, they are called Guindians. Their assimilation is so wonderfully American that if the Statue of Liberty could shed a tear, she would. Because of the amount of cologne they wear.


TIME responds: We sincerely regret that any of our readers were upset by Joel Stein’s recent humor column “My Own Private India.” It was in no way intended to cause offense.

Joel Stein responds: I truly feel stomach-sick that I hurt so many people. I was trying to explain how, as someone who believes that immigration has enriched American life and my hometown in particular, I was shocked that I could feel a tiny bit uncomfortable with my changing town when I went to visit it. If we could understand that reaction, we’d be better equipped to debate people on the other side of the immigration issue.

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Sunny Leone a true Canadian DESI now back in India !.

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2000996,00.html

The Last Airbender: Worst Movie Epic Ever?
By Richard Corliss Friday, Jul. 02, 2010



Asian Americans, I hear your agitation. For the past few weeks, you and your allies in ethnic correctness have clogged the blogosphere with complaints about the casting in M. Night Shyamalan's live-action movie version of the Nickelodeon animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender. Yes, the main villain roles among the rapacious Fire People are played by men of Indian descent (as is Shyamalan). Yes, Aang, the show's Chinese hero, is played by a Caucasian boy named Noah Ringer; and two other pasty white kids, Nicola Peltz and Jackson Rathbone, were chosen to impersonate Aang's main pals, Katara and Sokka. Actually, the actors who voice the Asian roles in the TV series are Caucasian too — but never mind that, because, yes again, it's a shame the film's producers couldn't find suitable Chinese youngsters among the 500 million or so on earth.

You can relax, bloggers. The dearth of racially appropriate casting in the U.S. simply means that fewer Asians were humiliated by appearing in what is surely the worst botch of a fantasy epic since Ralph Bakshi's animated desecration of The Lord of the Rings back in 1978. The actors who didn't get to be in The Last Airbender are like the passengers who arrived too late to catch the final flight of the Hindenburg.


Oh, the humanity! Where is it in this movie? The lack of vitality and even surface plausibility numbs the senses. Actors wander through sets, speak their lines and battle computer-generated beasts without ever convincing the viewer that they are the characters they're playing, let alone that these characters are worth investing an evening in. Shyamalan and his team have devised a fantasy environment that's both bland and murky; it's not a world that rewards the search for visual grandeur or eccentricity. The dialogue he wrote has the stilted sagacity of a fortune-cookie dictum; after each line is delivered, you may be tempted to shout out, "In bed!" The movie's lavish scale is matched by its amateur-hour naiveté — as if a Wall Street plutocrat had spent millions on a monumental pageant for his 10-year-old daughter's birthday party, then staged it himself on his country estate and invited his neighbors and their kids to play the leads. (Shyamalan shot most of this $150 million movie near his suburban Philadelphia home; it's the most expensive film ever made in the Philly).

Like its source TV show, dreamed up by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, Airbender posits a world divided into four nations by its elements: Earth, Air, Water and Fire. The planet manages a certain harmony because each group has strengths — "bending" capabilities — that counter those of the others. (Is there another planet where the ruling tribes are Rock, Paper and Scissors?) But lately the Fire People have made war on the others, whose only hope is in the prophecy of a savior: an avatar who has mastered all four elements. That would be Aang, a child with a sacred blue arrow tattooed on his bald scalp. One problem, though: ages ago, back in Messiah school, he played hooky during the earth-, wind- and fire-bending classes. He must learn these skills quickly, before Prince Zuko the Fireboy (Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire) and his devious adviser, Commander Zhao (Aasif Mandvi, senior Asian correspondent on The Daily Show), dare I say, Rule the World. Insert evil laugh here.
(Comment on this story.)

One word in the TV show's title — Avatar — reminds you, by its absence, what The Last Airbender is missing. Shyamalan has none of James Cameron's gift for building a cohesive, compelling fantasy from scratch. Cameron's Avatar has a density of imagination, suggesting that the filmmakers thought out every aspect of Pandora, within the audience's field of vision and beyond it. Airbender settles for a limited vision and stodgy attitude. The promise of fabulous martial-arts scenes goes unrealized; there's no great kung-fu fighting here. It happens that Ringer is the junior tae kwon do champion of Texas, but the movie uses his athleticism mainly to strike balletic poses, as if he wants to be not the Karate Kid but Billy Elliot.


Ringer, despite eerily resembling a pint-size version of TIME book critic and fantasy author Lev Grossman, is utterly bereft of charisma. He's the inert center of a dead movie. But then good actors often give subpar performances in Shyamalan films (Sigourney Weaver in The Village, Paul Giamatti in Lady in the Water, Zooey Deschanel in The Happening), making me suspect the fault is with the director. Maybe he needed stars like Bruce Willis (in The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable) and Mel Gibson (in Signs) to link their gravitas to his solemnity.

That was always Shyamalan's distinction: in a terminally frivolous era, he's just about the last serious guy making Hollywood-style movies. "For me," he told TIME's Desa Philadelphia in 2004, "the challenge is taking a B-movie subject like ghosts or aliens or monsters in the woods and treating it with absolute respect and sincerity." In The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, he wedded that sincerity to a classically austere camera style that helped those early fables of bereavement weave canny spells over the mass audience. But whatever knack he had, he has misplaced, as the level of his movies' achievement has declined from spot-on to near miss to incompetent and clueless.

In his first film adaptation — his most expensive project by far — Shyamalan has hit paper-scissors-rock bottom, and the promise of a sequel at this movie's end feels more like a threat. Please, Hollywood, if there's to be another Airbender movie, hand the job to some efficient hack, and not to a once mesmerizing artist who's lost his way.

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Sunny Leone a true Canadian DESI now back in India !.

This joker is worried about changing face of one small town when he should have been worried about the changing face of USA in which Hispanics would have majority in next 5 decades or about Europe which would be dominated by Islamists. TIME is a pseudo liberal magazine which would not dare to publish article on Hispanic immigrants. This guy is complaining about uneducated merchants but does not write a single word about uneducated Mafia imported by his countrymen.

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Originally posted by Vandematram

First we were thrown out of Indonesia, Cambodia, Vitenam, Myanmar and then we were thrown out of African countries like Uganda, South Africa, Kenya and now it is the turn of North America and Europe.

In Canada it will be Brampton, Mississauga and BC.

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Give free food http://www.thehungersite.com ||

Quote:

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Originally posted by Vandematram

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2000996,00.html

The Last Airbender: Worst Movie Epic Ever?
By Richard Corliss Friday, Jul. 02, 2010



Asian Americans, I hear your agitation. For the past few weeks, you and your allies in ethnic correctness have clogged the blogosphere with complaints about the casting in M. Night Shyamalan's live-action movie version of the Nickelodeon animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender.

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Do we have any stats/studies about us (Indian Canadian)?

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Originally posted by Vandematram

The U.S. Census Bureau adds that there were 231,000 businesses owned by Indian Americans in 2002, which employed 615,000 workers and had revenues of over $89 billion. (The Census Bureau conducts the survey every five years, and the results of the 2007 survey will be available in a few days). A study led by Vivek Wadhwa for Duke University and the University of California, Berkeley, found that Indian immigrant entrepreneurs had founded more engineering and technology companies during 1995-2005 than immigrants from Britain, China, Japan, and Taiwan combined. Of all immigrant-founded companies, 26 per cent had Indian founders.

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