Every so often one stumbles upon a piece of writing, often tossed casually into a group where most people will skim it, forward a meme, and forget it, but every now and then one of these things sticks, and this happened to me recently when someone shared an article on Indians abroad and the so-called “model minority,” a label once worn like a badge of honour but now clearly fraying at the edges. I should have done what everyone else did, make a clever remark, scroll on, and get back to work, but instead I found myself circling back to it, worrying at it like an old bone, realising that perhaps I am peculiarly placed to see how the stereotype was made and how it is unravelling.
Because over the years my wanderings, sometimes for work, sometimes for leisure, sometimes simply because of a fondness for golf, gin, food, and people, have thrown me into conversations across strata and circumstance, from a Nepali immigrant grabbing his last meal after a fourteen-hour shift in a Pakistani joint in Dubai to a Scotsman raising a glass after a leisurely round of golf at the Sentosa Golf Club to a Lebanese refugee finishing her shift and joining me for a coffee at a Melbourne bistro. And it is in such encounters, not mediated through the comforting cocoon of fellow Indians abroad but through Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Arabs, Persians, Europeans, Africans, Australians, Chinese, and even Indians who have not seen India for generations, that I learnt how we are seen: not always flatteringly, not always fairly, but almost always honestly.
So here I am, committing myself (also because I have been going through a writer’s block lately) to a series of three essays, long, wandering digressions really, which I may write in one burst and publish all at once, or let trickle out in their own rhythm depending on how much tea I drink and how much patience I have for my own verbosity, about how Indians abroad came to be seen as the model minority, how that halo has begun to slip, and how the story might unfold hereafter.
Think of this as the trailer, the warning shot, the hint of things to come, and be prepared that what follows will not be polite, it will not be predictable, and it will certainly be as contradictory, argumentative, self-congratulatory, and self-critical as Indians themselves.
Later Edit
You may find these three essays here:
Part I: The Model: Success Without Noise.
Part II: The Cacophony: Noise Without Success.
Part III: The Orchestra: Success Beyond Noise.
