Sublime

Slowly we became—all four of us—American. For Bhupendra and Bhanu this would become clearer with each visit to India or Fiji. Although they tried to blend in, to do as the locals did, the mask was less and less perfect. The changes were physiological: they could not drink the water, had to be careful about what they ate, were bothered by pollution.

While the anthropological definition is certainly less overtly racist and elitist, it is clear today that this approach can and did open the door for a pernicious kind of cultural commodification—that is, a set of conditions wherein the collective heritage of a neighborhood, city, people, or nation is commodified via tourism or the selling of goods

Here is where culture enters the picture. I mean“culture” in its anthropological rather than artisticsense. What values and practices can hold people to-gether as the institutions in which they live fragment? My generation suffered from a want of imagination inanswering this question, in advancing the virtues ofsmall-scale community. Co

Slowly Surat's fortunes—and those of the countryside surrounding it—began to fade. The river port was capricious, flooding the town each monsoon and at other times silting over, becoming impassable. The city was plagued by chronic conflict among various European and Muslim rulers, as well as attacks by pirates and marauders lusting after its treasu

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.

I loved living there, but I don’t know if I would look back on it so fondly if it had been the only life I’d ever known, had I not carried my American roots with me while I was there and elsewhere, had I not been certain that freedoms I couldn’t enjoy in my current reality were just a flight away.

Entering its gates, he passed rows of beggars, and could not imagine hardening himself to the sight every day; was this the new India, or was it an India he had never noticed as a child?

Just a few months earlier, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service had announced that it would help schools by allowing them to have prospective students take the TOEFL, the Test of English as a Foreign Language, abroad rather than coming to the United States for it.

Nainesh said he identified strongly with the term "ABCD," which stands for "American-Born Confused Desi," desi meaning Indian—a self-mocking label that hints at the difficulties of forging a new identity in the United States.