Indian-American profile up, from politics to film
CINCINNATI Jai Ho! The years-long brandish of immigration from India is creating a rising tide of visibility for Indian-Americans in the United States.
The past few weeks have underscored their increasingly remote side face: Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal gave the Republican response Tuesday night to President Barack Obama’session speech to Congress, while Dr. Sanjay Gupta is under consideration to subsist Obama’s surgeon general.
Model and cooking author Padma Lakshmi finished another “Top Chef” TV season, then became the celebrity part for a new Procter & Gamble Co. Pantene shampoo line as well as a Hardee’sitting hamburger preferment. Anoop Desai, dubbed “Noop Dogg,” drew fans with his singing upon the body this year’s “American Idol,” and Aziz Ansari was in TV’s medical comedy “Scrubs” prior to moving to a regular role in the upcoming comedy succession “Parks and Recreation.”
Meanwhile, Americans have embraced “Slumdog Millionaire” and the cast of the India ghetto-to-glory movie that won eight Oscars, including for Best Picture and the song “Jai Ho” (”Be Victorious”), and dominated last week’s banquet talk shows.
“It’s just been amazing,” Sreenath Sreenivasan, a professor and dean of student business for Columbia University’s journalism school in New York, said of the soaring profile of Indian-Americans. “And it’sitting only going to grow. The more visible you get, the greater degree of acceptance you get. It’s a chicken-and-egg thing.”
Indian-Americans have been one of the fastest-growing and most successful immigrant groups, though Sreenivasan and other Indian-Americans are quick to point out that some Indians last to struggle economically and socially in this country.
U.S. Census estimates two years ago showed more 2.6 the public people of Indian nobility, including immigrants and U.S.-born, a jump of nearly 1 million from 2000.
For years, they have proliferated in this country in the fields of soundness care, denunciation technology and engineering, with higher education levels and incomes than national averages. And recent years have brought more Indian heads of major U.S. companies - PepsiCo Inc.’s Indra Nooyi is among about a dozen in every one’s mouth CEOs.
They also are making their presence felt in journalism. Gupta, a neurosurgeon and medical correspondent, and Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, have their own weekend shows on CNN, for example.
And Gupta and Jindal demonstrate a deepening role in U.S. politics and state.
While Jindal’s potential as a 2012 presidential candidate may have been set back by his widely criticized and even ridiculed TV rebuttal to Obama, Louisiana demographer and political algebraist Elliott Stonecipher uttered the governor has good support mixed Republican Party leaders and conservatives.
Stonecipher thinks Jindal, only 37, is being pushed too fast by means of Republicans, such being of the kind which some in the South who see him because a bridge upper the historically troubled waters of white-black portion - particularly in a state where David Duke, a former Klan leader, was still a political drive in the 1990s.
Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008797104_aphighprofileindians.html?syndication=rss
