Source: www.time.com
USA, July 1, 2010: [HPI note: A recent issue of Time magazine published an article by columnist Joel Stein that talked, in off-key and somewhat racist terms, about how Indian immigrants had transformed the town of Edison, NJ, where he grew up. At first, the HPI team decided to ignore it — Stein’s satires usually carry little intellectual weight and this one, short in wit and poor in humor, seemed undeserving of more publicity. However, we now publish a summary here after a mixed but loud reaction from the American-Indian community. By now, both Time magazine and Stein have apologized. As always, you can read the full piece at “source,” above.]
My town is totally unfamiliar to me. The Pizza Hut where my busboy friends stole pies for our drunken parties is now an Indian sweets shop with a completely inappropriate roof. The A&P I shoplifted from is now an Indian grocery. The multiplex where we snuck into R-rated movies now shows only Bollywood films and serves samosas. The Italian restaurant that my friends stole cash from as waiters is now Moghul, one of the most famous Indian restaurants in the country. There is an entire generation of white children in Edison who have nowhere to learn crime.
I never knew how a bunch of people half a world away chose a random town in New Jersey to populate. Were they from some Indian state that got made fun of by all the other Indian states and didn’t want to give up that feeling? Are the malls in India that bad? Did we accidentally keep numbering our parkway exits all the way to Mumbai?
Eventually, there were enough Indians in Edison to change the culture. At which point my townsfolk started calling the new Edisonians “dot heads.” One kid I knew in high school drove down an Indian-dense street yelling for its residents to “go home to India.” In retrospect, I question just how good our schools were if “dot heads” was the best racist insult we could come up with for a group of people whose gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose.