Danny ChaiYou know what I find interesting. None of the Indians I’ve known have ever had American names. Except for like Jay which is also an Indian name. But yeah, they all have Indian first names. Unlike East Asian Americans, who frequently give their kids American first names. Why East Asians and not Indians?
This came to mind this weekend when we played basketball with some people and one of the guys there, Indian, introduced himself as “Mark”. And that just kind of took me by surprise and I realized it’s because I’ve never met an Indian American with an American name before.
Is this related to how Indians view culture and stuff? Maybe they’re more concerned with preserving culture and less concerned with penetrating American culture than East Asians? That’s probably completely wrong. I’m just wondering, because I know there are East Asian American representatives, there’s an East Asian American governor, an East Asian American on the cabinet. I just realized I have no awareness of the penetration of Indian Americans in politics. Maybe they haven’t penetrated as much? Why? Is it purely a numbers thing? I dunno.
And do Indians identify themselves as being Asian American? In high school our Asian club included Indians but it was a bit awkward, I thought. Like, our sweatshirt had anime characters on it. Is that representative of Indian culture at all? What exactly is representative of all of Asia? I dunno, it’s hard to find anything.
My claim: it’s curry. I’ve said it before, but curry is the one commonality in all of Asia. No matter where you go in Asia, you’ll find some form of curry. That’s what we should have put on our T-shirt.
Random.