Migrant Pains

Joel Stein’s comments in Time magazine raised howls of protest among the Indians in the US. V. Gangadhar discusses why we are hypersensitive about our ethnicity
The agraharams (Brahmin colonies) in my native Palakadu village have changed. Today there are non-Brahmin residents. The change, though accepted, has been commented upon occasionally in the media, but no one made an issue of it. Look at the population changes in Bombay, and now Mumbai, from the 1950s when the fledgling Shiv Sena, started by cartoonist Bal Thackeray, vigorously tried to get rid of, in stages, South Indians, Gujaratis, Marwaris, and more recently, natives of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.