Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents

By one estimate, sixty thousand people were jailed across India for gathering, making, or rallying around salt.

With the consolidation of the apartheid government's power, from the 1950s onward, Indian and African neighborhoods were bulldozed, raided, terrorized; thousands and then hundreds of thousands were forced to move to new "locations," residential areas without running water, plumbing, sewage, or electricity. Thousands more were denied licen

In 1947, as one of his first acts, Nehru laid the foundation stone of the first national laboratory in Delhi. Within a few years he broke ground on the first of the research universities later known as the Indian Institutes of Technology, on the site of a large detention camp where the British had held protesters during the historic 1930 salt march

"Either way, she would lose her son." A religious man not only renounces worldly possessions; he must also shed attachments of any sort, including family ties.

Gujarat remained the campaign's epicenter. Waves of spontaneously organized, resolutely nonviolent volunteers from all over India traveled to the coast of Gujarat to make salt from the ocean or take it from the British company's salt pans. Government police, frustrated by the volunteers' unvarying tactic of walking forward unarmed, shifted from clu

In 1980, the year I started fourth grade, the Census Bureau counted 387,233 "Asian Indians" in the United States. The main feature of our presence, one study noted, was that we were "inconspicuous" and "rapidly assimilated." Economically, academically, on paper we fit smoothly into the middle class.

the brain drain. Coined in 1962 to describe the large-scale migration of skilled technocrats from Britain to the United States, the term was quickly co-opted to describe a related, even more dramatic phenomenon: the movement of educated professionals from developing countries, particularly India and China, to developed nations, particularly the Uni

As one UNESCO writer wryly commented, "There is the gravest ground for suspecting that the existing pursuit of knowledge in the world is not directed to what is desirable or necessary in the interests of the world as a whole but may well be oriented almost exclusively to the needs and desires of the most advanced societies in the world."

New Jersey's Indian population was growing steadily, and the backlash was fierce; the state had seen a rash of unsolved hate crimes in the late 1980s, committed by an anonymous group who called themselves the Dotbusters and took as their target the bindi, or "dot," that Hindu women wear on their foreheads.