The desi you talk about in Queens are almost like the desi in the Vancouver area. Everything from the hip-hop bhangra to speaking good punjabi is the same here in Vancouver. I have also noticed this in the punjabi community in California especially in Central Califronia area from Stockton to Bakerfield.

Here in Vancouver several people including a punjabi youth counselor have told me that punjabi girls go to college alot more then punjabi boys. But also alot of young punjabi males who don’t go to college, still get good paying jobs such as driving trucks,building houses or working in wharehouses or in lumber mills. Then there are those young men who have chosen the wrong path and ended up in gangs. Over 100 young punjabi males have lost there life to gang violence, most of it brown on brown. I have 2nd cousins who are dead or in jail for a long time due to this lifestyle.

It means that life in big cities has certain constants that transcend the different ethnicities and nationalities that happen to coalesce there at different times in history. I’m not in any way singling out desis. Quite the contrary: I am pointing to constants in human experience. As for the “four plots” — perhaps it is seven — Aristotle said that all human tragedy reduces to seven core plots — and it’s a writer’s old saw that there are a small number of core stories “out there” to be told, and most stories are variations on this core set.

I don’t know about your perspective as a lifelong NYer but since you ask about my background, I didn’t grow up in a small town and I didn’t grow up in white America, in fact I didn’t grow up in America at all. I grew up in Paris with roots in Calcutta and in several East Coast cities — Boston, NYC, Washington — so like it or not, you’re talking to another metropolitan cat here, and a relatively globalized one at that. Oh, I’m also only half-desi. Anyway, that’s where I’m coming from. Feel free to drop me a line if you want to talk literature and, yes, anthropology. Sincere offer.

YO, what the heck does this mean? sometimes i get the sense that desis from “the hood” are an object of anthropological curiosity for all the brown folks who grew up in small-town white america (as you said –”characters” in some “urban story”). i don’t know anything about your background, and i’m not trying to be presumptuous– but your little comment about the “four plots” was lame and kind of weird from my perspective as a lifelong NYer…

Everyone Singh together now!