Little nuggets in Little India: Microsoft’s first Indian hire, comedy and more
The April issue of Little India Magazine has hit well-stocked mailboxes everywhere.
Among the highlights in this issue are reader mail commenting on the fleeceing of Non-Resident Indians visiting their Old Country, and on the academic prowess of Indians in America. The editorial writers take a break from spelling out the ills that America’s highest-earning ethnic group has to deal with in the United States of Evil and instead ponder whether India will be able to sustain its rapid economic growth in the face of widespread and deep-rooted corruption, strained infrastructure, huge class differences and lingering rural poverty. A timely article deals with illegal alien Indians and their hardships in the U.S. (just between you and me: If America starts a guest worker program, I think Mexicans can kiss their plum $6/hour jobs good bye - it’ll be Indians and Chinese all the way, unless Congress creates a special set-aside for our southern neighbor).
Did I call Indians an ethnic group? They are of course a collection of ethnic groups:
“It’s a population most people tend to ignore. When people think of people from South Asia, they think of the engineers, the doctors, and the IT workers, but there’s definitely a working class population here from the Punjabi community, as well as from Pakistan and Nepal.”
Little India is methodically working its through industries with lots of Indians, and the current issue focuses on Indian Microsoft millionaires (there are a few of them). It also has an article on the very first Indian hired by Mircosoft. It somewhat awkwardly contains the folowing phrase:
When Remala joined Microsoft in 1981 it was a fry cry from today’s Microsoft, which lures the best and brightest…
And I would rather read Little India than the finest magazine in the world.
That’s a joke, and speaking of jokes, there’s an article on an Indian stand-up comedian who cracks jokes about - what else? - dotcoms. I rather liked this one:
I am an expert on layoffs. Just like Fire drills, every company should have Fired Drills. The alarm goes off, you pack up your crap and leave the building. The all clear alarm would say: “This was just a drill. If it were to be the real layoff, the security guard would have been much bigger and your severance package much smaller.
When I was laid off the security guards weren’t all that big, but they had guns. Guns are cool.
All that and a lot more. Check it out.
It’ll be interesting to see what Little India does with Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard student and disgraced author who has generated so much interest in both America and India.
