Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said his deputy, Neel Kashkari, will be in charge of the bailout passed by Congress, and almost immediately Time magazine dubbed him the “$700 billion man.” However worrisome and complicated the crisis and the bailout, Kashkari’s appointment was personally exciting for one reason: he is Indian-American.
According to reports, the 35-year old Kashkari is the son of Indians who immigrated to the United States from Kashmir. It’s a long way from the scenic Himalayas to the waters of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, where Kashkari was raised.
Kashkari joins an impressive list of Indian-Americans who burst onto the American public sphere in quite a hurry over the past few years. I used to joke that we will know for sure that we have arrived on the U.S. scene when one of us got enmeshed in an embarrassing, high profile controversy. Well, not anymore. It has been simply fascinating to watch Indian-Americans exercising a remarkable level of influence.
It was an Indian-American who led the legal fight that profoundly changed our treatment of Guantanamo detainees. Neal Katyal, who is a law professor at Georgetown University, was barely 36 years old when he won Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld — a Supreme Court ruling that challenged the current administration’s interpretation of executive powers.
Another one almost became a vice presidential nominee. Bobby Jindal, who is the 37-year old governor of Louisiana, was a serious contender for the second spot on the Republican ticket.
Readers of Newsweek may be familiar with Fareed Zakaria, who also hosted a news show on PBS. A friend once described Zakaria as being sexier than Omar Sharif, and with brains on steroids!
Jhumpa Lahiri makes us think about profound issues through her award-winning narratives that are often about Indian-Americans. And director M. Night Shyamalan scares the daylights out of filmgoers with stories that are deceptively simple.
On the other hand, it was absolutely depressing to read that an Indian-American family was one of the first who lost their lives because of the current economic crisis.
Karthik Rajaram was a former employee of PriceWaterhouse Coopers and Sony Pictures in Southern California, but had been unemployed for a few months. He committed suicide, after killing his family — his wife, mother-in-law, and three children aged 19, 12 and 7. It is unfortunate that this Indian-American resorted to guns, reinforcing the notion that guns and violence, too, are as American as the oft-repeated apple pie and mom.
All these are absolute contrasts to the stereotypes that we run into on television and movies, where the typical Indian character is either a motel owner or a physician, both with accents far stranger than mine. After all, even from a statistical perspective, one would expect a lot more than just these two stereotypes when the population of India itself is more than a billion, and when a few million with Indian origins are scattered all over the planet!
Perhaps I am not different from other “ethnic” immigrants in getting pumped up. I clearly remember a fellow student in graduate school who was from Canada.
He was acutely aware of Jewish players in professional baseball, and his interest in this came from his passion for the game and from his Jewish background. To him, Sandy Koufax was not merely the best pitcher ever, but was almost a god. There is no Indian-American equivalent of Koufax. Yet.
There is no denying the fact that Kashkari, Katyal and others are fantastic testimony to the idea of America.
More than in any other country, it is in America that there is a high probability of anybody making it big in whatever they choose. It is that idea, an ideal even with its own blemishes, that continues to draw immigrants from all over the world, from thousands of miles away.
So, I don’t get depressed about the multi-trillion-dollar global economic crisis. After all, an Indian-American is in charge of straightening things out!
Published in the Register Guard, October 21st
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