Milano | CNYCA: Feet in Two Worlds: Talking Hearts: My First Radio Experience

Feet in Two Worlds: Indian Immigrants

When my mentor John warned me that the editing process for our scripts would be extensive, I didn’t pay much attention.

Fifteen revisions later, I understood what he meant. I had so many versions saved on my computer that towards the end I got confused about which was which. I had this habit of hopefully labeling each script “final version” … which would come back final version1, and turn into final version5, and then we’d start all over again.

The irony is that after all the revisions and cut-downs and restructurings—in which I tried to squeeze the whole history and future of Indian immigration into one six-minute piece, the story I ended up with was remarkably true to the story I stumbled upon when I went to India in December 2006: that young Indians no longer wanted to leave India for good. For them, going to America was a way to get exposure, build experience, have an adventure. What it was not was a lifeline out of a sinking economic ship.

During that trip, I did a group interview with my 23-year-old cousin and his roommates, all engineers working for American multinationals, about what they thought of globalization, India, the United States. When all of them said that they wanted to visit and work in the U.S. but not settle there because they cared about being close to their families and felt loyalty to India, I didn’t believe them. In a classic, American “know it all” way, I told them that once you get there you’ll never come back because, after all, that was the way it had always been.

What I have learned since then is that young Indians today have options—in some ways more exciting and diverse than most Americans, because they have two worlds of opportunity rather than one to choose from. Those who wish to uproot themselves and create a new life in the U.S. can come here to do so because of the demand for highly skilled immigrants, and those who want to come to the U.S. to build experience that will help them go back to India and create even better economic opportunities for themselves can do so too. It’s an enviable position, and when you talk to these young workers you feel a sense of optimism brimming from them—and it’s that optimism that I think is helping India surge ahead.

Even this reporter couldn’t help but catch the bug. I found myself Googling job openings in Mumbai and Delhi the other day. After all, with all the buzz about India to report on, there must be a few openings for foreign correspondents.