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An Indian American president in 2020? An Indian American president of the USA in 2020? It may sound fantastic now, but Jay Goyal, a 27-year-old legislator from Ohio, is confident that an Indian American will be in the race for the US presidency in another 10 years or so. 'Within 10-12 years, you can expect an Indian American to be in the US presidential race. I won't be surprised when it happens,' Goyal, who is in India to catch up with his friends and extended family, said here. 'It's a matter of time. It's going to happen,' the dapper Goyal, who has been hailed as a new emerging face of the Democratic Party, said when asked whether Indian Americans are ambitious enough to covet the top job in the US. 'With the second generation of Indian Americans, there will be a significant increase in the number of young members of the community proactively participating in US politics,' he said while referring to the spectacular success of Bobby Jindal, who won the election on a Republican platform to become the governor of Louisiana last year. This interest in politics stands out in dramatic contrast to the 1970s and 1980s when Indian Americans were not sure whether politics was the right choice for them. 'It's changing now. Indian Americans have always chosen safe professions in which they can succeed financially. Politics was looked at in a different light. Now of course all that is changing,' Goyal said. Goyal, a second generation Indian American who became the youngest legislator when he was elected from 73rd District to the Ohio House of Representatives three years ago, is not shy about citing his success in a white-majority district as a taste of things to come. 'I am the youngest person in the Ohio assembly. In this district of 110,000 people, only 100-150 people are Indian Americans. Yet I won 63 percent of the vote,' said Goyal who, as local folklore has it, knocked on 13,000 doors to get elected. 'It speaks volumes about how much the Indian community has been integrated into the American mainstream. We have to leverage our financial muscle into political power,' he asserts confidently. It's not that this race to the top is going to be smooth sailing all the way. There may be some landmines and prejudices on the way. 'Racism exists. Racism exists everywhere. My family too has faced discrimination and snide comments like you don't belong here. This attitude became slightly more pronounced after 9/11,' said Goyal. 'But an overwhelming majority of people looks past that. They look at your values and actions. And the Indian and American values are identical in terms of emphasis on family, education and hard work,' Goyal, whose family migrated to the US in the 1970s, said with a faint American accent. Goyal believes that failure of the India-US civil nuclear deal would be a big disappointment to the Indian American community who have lobbied tirelessly to get the 123 legislation past the Congress last year, but it would not be a decisive setback to burgeoning India-US ties in the long term. 'If the deal passes, the strategic relationship will grow more vigorously. If it doesn't, the relationship will probably not be as close as it would have been. But neither would there be a rollback from the present state of ties,' he said. Batting vigorously for his party, which is known to be hawkish on non-proliferation, Goyal said the deal has a future under the Democratic dispensation. 'If you look at last year's voting pattern in the US Congress, there is a significant Democratic support for the nuclear deal.' Whom is he betting on in the 2008 poll sweepstakes? Goyal plays it cautiously, refusing to name any favourites, but one thing he is sure of - a Democratic victory would be a boost to India-US ties and the Indian American community. 'That's because the Democratic Party is more aligned with the values of Indian Americans,' he said. Philanthropy the new muse of NRIs Adopt a village in rural Punjab. Or, help clean up dirty rivers and build houses for the impoverished in the hinterlands of India. This is the new philanthropic mantra that has fired the imagination of NRIs, says Harinder Takhar, the first Indian origin minister in Canada's biggest province Ontario. 'Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) are now really interested in doing something more meaningful and lasting for the country they left behind,' Takhar, Minister of Small Business and Entrepreneurship in Ontario, said in an interview during a recent visit to New Delhi. 'NRIs can contribute in a positive way to socio-economic transformation of India. We are now thinking in terms of giving concrete shape to some of these ideas like adopting a village or building schools,' Takhar, who had come here to attend the sixth conclave of overseas Indians, said. 'The Punjab government has come out with many ideas and suggestions like building schools, hospitals or gurdwaras in fifty-fifty partnership. We are open to these ideas,' he said. Takhar, a 50-something businessman who migrated to Canada from Punjab in the early seventies, is, however, not in favour of centralised funds to channelise the NRIs' philanthropic impulse. 'Large centralised funds entail huge administrative costs. Moreover, we are not sure whether money is being used for intended beneficiaries,' said Takhar, who also served as a minister of transport in Ontario government. 'If it is done individually, they can relate to these projects better. They can see the change happening with their own eyes,' he said. Takhar is impressed by winds of change sweeping the country he left behind in early seventies and transformation in its image as a rising power in the world. 'India is on the way to becoming an economic power and is seen increasingly as an economic giant with its economy growing at around 10 per cent every year. The world is now realising that India is the place to be in. 'For NRIs, it's a big moment. There is a resurgent pride in India and all things Indians.' Economic ties between India and Canada, however, remain much below potential with bilateral trade just about $4 billion, Takhar said, stressing that both countries need to do more to cash in on new opportunities. 'We need to promote Canada as a top investment destination. It has a conducive business environment and is home to world class companies. Some of big Indian companies like Tatas, Aditya Birla Group and Ranbaxy are already here,' he said. 'What stands in the way is a lack of sufficient information about opportunities in both countries. We need to make Canadian companies more aware of huge opportunities in India,' he said. Takher also made a strong pitch for an entry of Canadian carmakers in India's burgeoning automobile sector. Ontario is the leader in the automobile sector in North America, but a downturn in the US economy has hit this sector in Canada, with car manufacturers announcing cuts in jobs. The Indian market is becoming more attractive to Canadian companies, he said. An invitation to attend the Pravasi Divas, as the jamboree of overseas Indians is called, is a chance to replenish roots and old values that sustain the spectacular success of overseas Indians in their adopted countries. 'NRis are extremely hard working and passionate about what they are doing. They want to pay back and make a lasting contribution to the country they left behind years ago,' he said. 'Functions like the Pravasi Divas help to promote an active dialogue between the diaspora and India. It gives the NRIs a sense of what is happening in India and what the government is trying to achieve.' 'Indians abroad can harness their skills and expertise to benefit India,' he added.
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I can't go on, says Beckett's Unnamable. I will go on. A writer's injuries are his strengths, and from his wounds will flow his sweetest, most startling dreams.
And Proust, too, killing himself to write his book comes close to the concept of dharma when, echoing Balzac, he says that in the end it's less the desire for fame than 'the habit of laboriousness' that takes a writer to the end of a work. But dharma, as this ideal of truth to oneself, or living out the truth in oneself, can also be used to reconcile men to servitude and make them find in paralyzing obedience the highest spiritual good. 'And do thy duty, even if it be humble,' says the Aryan Gita,
'rather than another's, even it be great. To die on one's duty is life: to live in another' death.
My discovery over the years is that the mother tongues have so much in them, so much that is alive, and are much more pervasive, in all strata of society, in all ages from children to the very old, men and women, literate and non-literate. What holds them together? It's not Sanskrit. It's these mother tongues. I think I went into linguistics because of that. That spoken languages had to be very, very important. It was important in my youth to have discovered this.
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We are talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled expression in economical ways. Let's not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by daemons. He doesn’t know why they chose him and he is usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
I am trembling with cold