This article in Time Magazine shows how some Americans feel about
immigration.There is a large Goan Community in New Jersey-and I wonder how
Canadians would feel about the old and new Mississauga!Are the Goans "Bhailes"
in the US and Canada?Food for thought!!
Regards
Vasant
MY OWN PRIVATE INDIA
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1999416,00.html
By Joel Stein
I am very much in favor of immigration everywhere in the U.S. except Edison,
N.J. The mostly white suburban town I left when I graduated from high school in
1989 — the town that was called Menlo Park when Thomas Alva Edison set up shop
there and was later renamed in his honor — has become home to one of the
biggest
Indian communities in the U.S., as familiar to people in India as how to
instruct stupid Americans to reboot their Internet routers.
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. (See pictures of Thomas Edison's Menlo Park.)
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?
