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Smith, Side, “Filmmaker Takes Spin at Race Relationship with Daring ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’”, Chicago Tribune, April 6, 1986. "My Beautiful Laundrette” opens to a commercial audience. Writer Hanif Kureishi notes that he couldn’t get a producer for a film about a gay Pakistani who runs a laundrette in London slums and so raised money through British television. He wrote "Laundrette" partly to get at British race relations, a subject he considers largely unexplored by movies. Fatsis, Stefan, “Newsfeatures”, The Associated Press, November 1, 1987, New York. South Asian immigrants have helped increase the number of sidewalk newsstands by 30 in the last two years to almost 300 in New York City. The trade had sunk to all-time lows in the early '80s. South Asians operate almost all the stands in the subway system. The Indian community in New York now numbers about 40,000. Indians, Koreans, Chinese, Israelis and Russians have accounted for the most immigrant cab drivers in recent years. Walt, Vivienne, “A New Racism Gets Violent in New Jersey; The 'Dotbusters,' a self-named group, claimed they would go 'to any extreme' to rout Indians from Jersey City Heights. Many ugly incidents have made their claim seem all too real”, Newsday (New York), April 6, 1988. In the past six months, ethnic bigotry has resulted in a series of violent attacks against immigrants from India and Pakistan. Attacks include a gruesome murder, at least three assaults, a mail bomb, racial epithets scrawled on the walls of Indian homes and others shouted tauntingly in the streets. The "Dotbusters" are self-named for the red bindi mark worn by Indian women. According to some of Jersey City's 8,000 Indian immigrants, it was the first of many attacks rooted in anti-Indian hatred. Walt, Vivienne, “The Storm Over 'Satanic Verses'; ‘What they say about the book has nothing to do with what I wrote’”, Newsday (New York), February 14, 1989. "Satanic Verses”, published in London last September, was condemned by mullahs and Islamic establishment figures as blasphemous and contemptuous of Islam. Rushdie feels that his book has become a pawn in political disputes. In the opening sequence, an idolized film star of the Bombay "talkies" and an intellectual Anglophile find themselves floating improbably down to British soil after their plane from Bombay is blown up in midair. The sequence is fantastic, but the experience was very much Rushdie's. Kotkin, Joel, “Asian Indians in California Spotlight After Years in Shadows”, The Washington Post, May 6, 1990. Although small farming communities of Indians have existed in California since slightly after the turn of the century, the East Coast – with its concentration of large commercial centers – traditionally has attracted the bulk of immigrants. In the 1980 census, for instance, Asian Indians were virtually the only major immigrant Asian grouping for which California was not the leading center. For them, New York enjoyed a slight lead. Today, however, many Indians here believe that by the end of the 1990 census California's Indian population – estimated to have doubled this decade to more than 120,000 – will pass that of its East Coast rival. In contrast to shopkeepers, who tended to gravitate to the Northeast, these young technologists were lured by California's large concentration of computer and other cutting-edge industries. De Witt, Karen, “New York Pakistanis Seek Ballot Power”, The New York Times August 20, 1990. There are more than 40,000 Pakistanis in New York, say some Pakistani businessmen, enough to begin, like other emerging immigrant groups, to exercise some influence over what happens to them politically. Thirty-four Pakistani taxi drivers have been killed in holdups in the last four years, say Pakistani businessmen. Many of the drivers were relatively young men in their late 20s and early 30s whose families remained in Pakistan. The community donated more than $2,000 to ship each body back to Pakistan.
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