The spectacular success of Indians in the U.S. smashes old stereotypes and adds a dash of spice to the American melting pot By ANTHONY SPAETH When Manoj Night Shyamalan was growing up in suburban Philadelphia, his parents–both immigrants from India, both physicians–didn’t hesitate to pile on the pressure. There was simply an assumption that I’d come in first in my class, he recalls. He was also expected to follow them into medicine. When he announced his decision to study film at New York University, they were horrified. Put yourself in their shoes, Shyamalan says. Your son is doing well in school, and suddenly he wants to get a degree that means nothing to them. But few individuals with such an all-American ambition have been rewarded so quickly. In 1997, Disney paid him $2.5 million for the screenplay of The Sixth Sense and let him direct as well. Released last year, the ghost tale has earned more than $325 million and yielded six Academy Award nominations. Shyamalan’s parents are greatly relieved. If it hadn’t grossed $100 million, he laughs, I don’t know what they would have done. But now Shyamalan, 29, carries an even greater burden of expectation: rooting for him to win the best-director Oscar on March 26 will be 722,000 Indian immigrants and guest workers scattered across the United States for whom he has become a symbol of the success they hope to achieve. These days they have plenty of other role models. Two decades ago, Indians in the U.S. were usually found in scrubs in emergency rooms or changing sheets in family-owned motels. Today they are out of the mop closet and climbing onto top rungs in just about every industry. Indians are managing Fortune 500 companies , or, as consultants and securities analysts, telling others how to do so. Wall Street has its share, so too the media. And Silicon Valley is awash with subcontinental surnames. Venture capital fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of the Valley’s biggest, says 40% of its portfolio consists of companies founded or managed by persons of Indian origin. Meanwhile, the born-in-America second generation is making waves in publishing and the arts and getting invited to the Oscars. Atul Gawande, 29, has written speeches for Bill Clinton as a White House aide, earned a masters degree in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford University and is currently a surgical resident at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He’s also a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. I had this little extra thing, says Gawande of his upbringing as an Indian in largely white Athens, Ohio, that gave me a leg up. Touring India, Pakistan and Bangladesh this week, President Clinton will see the font of what has become one of the most successful immigrant groups in U.S. history. He will also see the conditions they fled–rampant corruption, state-controlled economies, meager employment opportunities–which he will doubtless point out from his traveling bully pulpit. But the strengths that Indian migrants brought with them, such as education and a command of English, and the factors that made them leave their homeland tell only half the story. Equally important is what those thousands of ambitious, uprooted souls found upon reaching America–or Amrika, as they like to call it: an economic system open to anyone from anywhere. Indians now have one of the highest per-capita incomes of any immigrant group in the U.S. It is a credit to this country that someone from a distant land can become an American, says Suhas Patil, founder and chairman emeritus of leading semiconductor manufacturer Cirrus Logic Corp. , who is now running an incubator company for Internet startups. I am what defines America. Other immigrant groups have felt the same welcoming embrace, but none has experienced the warp speed with which Indians–and to a lesser extent people from the other countries of the subcontinent–have gotten ahead in America. Brij Kapoor arrived in 1965 as an aircraft engineer and claims to be the first Indian to buy a house in Atlanta; the city is now home to more than 40,000 people of Indian descent. Kapoor hit the law books and started his own practice, cleverly concentrating on immigration cases. Of his four children, one is a lawyer, another an Air Force captain, the third is a computer engineer and the youngest, at 15, is thinking about legal studies. Says Kapoor: Indians are head and shoulders above any other ethnic group–the most successful in the United States. How did indians, in such a short time, reach such a critical mass in America’s professions and industry? One seemingly obvious factor–a large head count–can, in fact, be ruled out. The subcontinent may seem like a Niagra Falls of potential immigrants, a notion reinforced by the endless lines surrounding U.S. consulates from Karachi to Dhaka. But if anything, the number of Indian transplants has been comparatively modest. According to the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., the U.S. currently has 26.3 million immigrants. India’s contribution is only 722,000, far behind Mexico’s 7.1 million or the 1.3 million from the Philippines
