But from your comments, it seemed that you have a broad knowledge of indian culture, therefore……..

Khush = means Happy in Hindi Kush = Lav & Kush, mythological twins from Ramayana

I am Kush, if you haven’t figured that out. It doesn’t bother me at all……quite often, I Kooosh in Amrika.

Chickpea/Hanuman–yes, I feel the same way.

KIT: I agree. Every mode of immigration and migration has its trials and tribulations, and the impermanence, allegiance and instability of the H1-B must be pretty stressful.

ShokPact/technophobicgeek: I think this is also an oft remarked upon difficulty of immigration—it’s hard to settle your roots into the new place, but it’s also hard to ever truly go back home again.

Simran/KhushTandon–Yep, I read Nickeled and Dimed when it came out. It’s got some methodological issues, and by many accounts her follow up work (Bait and Switch–thanks Maisnon!–and a tirade against using domestic help) is not as good. ND was quite a departure from her decades worth of opinionating, which I grew up reading in the back of TIME. Ehrenreich was aiming to get at the plight of the women being dropped off the welfare rolls, so her thesis was a bit larger and more convoluted, but the basic experiences were similar and illustrative regardless:

Housing is a big deal. (This is particularly crucial since the obsolete poverty line metric overemphasizes food.) Networks are crucial for survival, and those without networks are often completely lost. It’s easy to be exploited. It’s emotionally draining. Naturally these are particularly likely to grate on immigrants.

Simran, you also touched on a larger point that I didn’t get to elaborate on. It’s our usual habit at the Mutiny to look at issues from a desi angle–”are there desi’s involved in this issue in anyway?” Poverty is particularly bad for the immigrant. But the flipside of that is looking out from our community with a heart strengthened by our desi experience. Immigrants (and their descendants) should be particularly mindful of the issues of poverty and migration. There isn’t a community in America that hasn’t been touched by the grim difficulty of transplanting and replanting–to the point that we celebrate and fetishize it with goodbye parties, college fledgling rituals, and housewarmings. But all that pomp and circumstance can’t hide the fact that nomadic wanderlust of the pioneer is quite plausibly matched by the grief and disorientation of the homebody. For those of us who easily ran off to college here and a new job there, who’ve got cell phones and email accounts galore, it’s difficult to recognize that the poor are often poor because they can’t leave, and when they can leave, they’re often really screwed. Our economy—regulated by the fed on a national scale–assumes that people will go where the jobs are. But the poor are less able to move with the market, and more likely to fail if they try. Has any ethnic group been so expressive and so articulate about the pain of transplanting as ours? Perhaps not. But we’re hardly alone. Native Americans on ten thousand Trails of Tears. And then all the rest of us.

And it keeps going on within the states. Fleeing slavery. Fleeing the cold countryside. Fleeing the sooty city. Fleeing the plantation. Fleeing the dust bowl. Fleeing segregation. Fleeing internment. Fleeing the draft. Fleeing crime. Fleeing high housing prices or bad education. Fleeing mental suffocation. Fleeing homophobia. Fleeing the madding crowd. It’s an American gift, this freedom of flight. Many of us might die or wither without it. But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy.

Hopefully we will always extend out this experience and skill we have at expressing and recognizing the needs of the transplant. The fact is that while it can be fun and hopeful and exciting, moving also often sucks. If tomorrow all the South Asian Americans magically became uniformly wealthy, reflecting our overall status, I’d like to think we’d remember our millenia tradition of respecting the pain of the exile and still care deeply about these issues of poverty and migration.

Chai, I too was amazed at both Desai’s linguistic skill and his ambition to teach it to others. It’s a great detail–when you respect and admire someone, you can also respect and acknowledge their problems, instead of a shallow and dismissable kind of pity. I’m thinking he’ll make it, though. Viva Desai!

Barbara Ehrenreich recently wrote “Bait and Switch”, sort of the same idea as her previous book – but exploring white-collar unemployment.

about a year ago, i heard her give a talk. yup, she was check-out clerk at wal-mart. she writes for nyt now and then.

good work, saheli