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Time Magazine (19 June
2000) - The Golden Diaspora The UK Telegraph (18 June 2000) - Bollywood takes on Hollywood CNNfn web site (21 June 2000) - India's Caltiger to go public Economic Times (23 June 2000) - Indian unveils world's fastest SRAM chip Reuters India (15 June 2000) - NIIT ties up with Sun Microsystems The
Golden Diaspora Indian immigrants to the U.S. are one of the newest elements of the American melting pot--and the most spectacular success story. When Manoj Night Shyamalan was growing up in suburban Philadelphia in the 1980s, his parents--both immigrants from India, both physicians--piled on the pressure. "There was simply an assumption that I'd come first in my class," he recalls. He was also expected to follow his parents into medicine. When he told them he would instead study movie making at New York University, they were horrified. Now they feel a lot better. In 1997, five years after his graduation, Walt Disney Studios paid Shyamalan $2.5 million for the screenplay of the Bruce Willis thriller The Sixth Sense and let the young writer direct the movie as well. The ghost tale has earned more than $680 million worldwide since its release last year and garnered six Academy Award nominations. "If it hadn't grossed $100 million," he laughs, "I don't know what my parents would have done." Shyamalan, 29, did not win an Oscar on March 26, but he has carved out another leading role for himself, as one of America's premier success symbols for 722,000 Indian immigrants and guest workers scattered across the country. And he is only one among many. Today South Asian immigrants are climbing the top rungs in just about every industry. Indians are running FORTUNE 500 companies (Rono Dutta is president of United Airlines, and Rakesh Gangwal is president and CEO of U.S. Airways) or, as consultants and securities analysts, telling others how to do so. (Calcutta-born Rajat Gupta, managing director of consulting giant McKinsey & Co., does both.) But above all, they are bringing their own entrepreneurial stamp to America's high-tech frontiers. Venture-capital fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley's biggest VC firms, says 40% of its portfolio consists of companies founded or managed by people of Indian origin. Indians have one of the highest per capita incomes of any immigrant group in the U.S. "It is a credit to this country that someone from a distant land can become an American," says Suhas Patil, founder and chairman emeritus of semiconductor manufacturer Cirrus Logic (1999 revenues: $564 million), who is now running an incubator company called Tufan, Inc. for Internet start-ups. "I am what defines America." The Indian success story is a triumph of quality over quantity. According to the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, an independent think tank, the U.S. is home to about 26.3 million immigrants, defined as people living in the U.S. who are foreign born and have permission to stay permanently. India's 722,000 is less than the number from the Dominican Republic. Some 15,000 to 20,000 Indians get student visas to the U.S. each year, and many manage to land jobs after graduation and stay on. But Japan gets three times that number, and South Korea double. The only category in which India really leads immigration statistics is the number of people granted H1B visas for "workers with speciality occupations." Indians take about 20% of all H1B visas issued each year, by far the largest proportion. Other numbers tell an even more intriguing success story. Only 6% of Indian immigrants live below the poverty line, vs. 31% of Mexicans and 8% of immigrants from Britain. Fewer than 1% use public assistance.While there has long been a trickle of immigration from South Asia, the big change came in 1965 when U.S. immigration statutes were liberalized to attract scientists and engineers to work in an American economy revved up by the Vietnam War. They fanned out to aircraft companies, NASA, military contractors and universities. Doctors were needed for President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society medical programs, and they were given preference too. Fewer than 2,000 people immigrated to the U.S. from India in the decade of the 1950s; in the '60s, 27,189 arrived; by the '80s, the number had jumped to a quarter-million. The immigrants often took jobs Americans had turned down because the pay was low or the location remote. "There would be an opening for a surgeon in Champagne, Ill.," says Fareed Zakaria, a Bombay-born academic who is managing editor of the prestigious quarterly Foreign Affairs, "and an Indian would take it." Then came the Silicon Valley boom, which shows no sign of letting up. As a result of all these circumstances, the Indian diaspora in the U.S. tends to be the intellectual and commercial elite. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, only 3% of Indian arrivals lack a high school education, and 75% of working Indians are college graduates. (For immigrants from China, the figure is 55%.) Says Rajini Srikanth, a professor of Asian-American studies at the University of Massachusetts: "What we got were people who already came blessed with all kinds of valuable baggage." In many cases, the Indian schools that newcomers had attended were as good as or better than many of their U.S. counterparts. Strong family ties also have helped. Vijay Goradia, who emigrated from Bombay in 1977 and now has a private petrochemical business in Houston with more than $600 million in revenues last year, says he could afford to take the entrepreneurial plunge because two brothers had preceded him to the U.S. and served as his safety net. "It gives you the spirit to be free, to take chances," he says. Yet at the same time, people from the subcontinent have tended to aim more than other first-generation arrivals for mainstream jobs, either in the professions or in corporations. Some of that is a hangover from British colonial experience, where a job in the civil service was the ultimate badge of accomplishment and security--a sentiment still strong on the subcontinent. More positively, Indian immigrants say they fit into corporate America because they already speak English. According to AnnaLee Saxenian, an associate professor of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley, about one-third of the engineers in Silicon Valley are of Indian descent, while 7% of valley high-tech firms are led by Indian CEOs. Some successes are well known, such as Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and Sabeer Bhatia, who founded HotMail and sold it to Microsoft for $400 million. The number of Indian American New Economy millionaires is in the thousands. Massachusetts' Gururaj Deshpande, co-founder of a number of network technology companies, is worth between $4 billion and $6 billion. Bigger changes loom with the second generation: the kids are sure to have ingrained Indian values but a world view completely at odds with their parents'. Dilip Massand, co-founder of masala.com, an Internet site for the second generation that he hopes to build into a "virtual diaspora," was raised from the age of six months in the New York City borough of Queens. Massand remembers going to makeshift Hindu shrines in people's basements. "The Catholics had beautiful churches, and the Jews had elaborate synagogues," he recalls. "I remember asking myself why our gods lived in a basement." It remains to be seen whether those successful Indian Americans can go back to kick-start opportunities in their native land, in the way that a "reverse brain drain" of technical talent helped build Taiwan's computer industry in the 1980s and '90s. K.S. Ramakrishna, raised in the southern state of Karnataka, got an M.B.A. from Ohio's Case Western Reserve University in 1990 but was forced to return home when his family business near Bangalore ran into difficulties. He straightened out the firm--it makes electric cables--but was disgusted by the local business culture: the complacency, corruption and lack of vision. But Ramakrishna persevered. He started his own business, growing roses for export, and senses that further opportunities abound. "For me to start up a business in America, I'd have to come up with some brilliant idea," he says. "Here it's so simple: you find an idea abroad, modify it for Indian conditions, and you make money." The crowning achievement of the Indian diaspora may be that its members bring that same entrepreneurial spark back to life in their homeland. --REPORTED BY WILLIAM DOWELL AND ROMESH RATNESAR/NEW YORK, BARRY HILLENBRAND/WASHINGTON, CHANDRIKA NARAYAN/DALLAS AND JACQUELINE SAVAIANO/LOS ANGELES Bollywood
takes on Hollywood at the British box office "BOLLYWOOD" films, extravagant Asian productions renowned for their epic length and lavish musical interludes, are achieving unprecedented success in British cinemas and even beating Hollywood at the box office. Three Bollywood productions recently entered the UK top 10 list of takings. "Dil se", a fast-paced terrorist action musical adventure film, spent longer in the top 10 than Battlefield Earth, starring John Travolta, and Saving Grace, starring Brenda Blethyn. The demand is not confined to Asian audiences or to those parts of Britain with large Asian communities. Non-Asian cinema-goers are queueing up to see the increasingly sophisticated productions, enticed by the popularity of Asian dance music, television series such as Goodness Gracious Me and the success of the British movie "East is East". Internet sites and television channels dedicated to the genre, which developed in Bombay, are also fuelling the boom. A recent relaxation of Indian censorship laws now allows Bollywood stars to become "pin-ups" for the first time. Cinema chains are rushing to take advantage of the trend, with Warner and Odeon opening large complexes with screens dedicated to Bollywood films next month. Bollywood actors are increasingly being feted in the same way as Hollywood stars and, next Saturday, the first ever annual Indian Film Awards will be held at the Dome. Sponsors of the ceremony, which will be hosted by Yukta Mookhey, the current Miss India and Miss World, include Marks & Spencer - another indication of the genre's penetration of the mainstream. Madame Tussaud's, the waxworks museum, is to recognise the subcontinent's actors with its first ever Bollywood model. A vote is being held to determine which of five nominated actors it should be. Mambo Sharman, who is organising the film awards, said: "The strange thing is how many non-Asians are going to see films. Often I go past a cinema in London and look at the queues for Bollywood films and there are as many white faces as Indians. It makes me feel guilty for not going as often as I should myself." He said the quality of Bollywood's storylines and production techniques had improved dramatically over recent decades. "The crucial thing is that the younger Indian stars are now like Hollywood stars. They are sex symbols." Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer, is staging a musical based on Bollywood that will be written by the award-winning lyricist Don Black and Hanif Kureshi. Aisha Nasib, entertainments editor of Eastern Eye said there is a growing appreciation of Asian and Indian culture. She said: "A film like East is East has helped enormously. It is not a Bollywood film, but it has introduced an audience to Asian writers, directors and writers. It has shown that we can be more than just shopkeepers." Saeed Jaffrey, who has appeared in both Bollywood and British films, including A Passage to India, said Bollywood's new popularity was in part a reaction to the effects-driven world of Hollywood. 'Part of Britain is getting bored with special effects. They want to go back to the world of romance and that's why Bollywood films appeal." Next month, Warner Village cinemas opens a 30-screen complex, Star City, in Birmingham that will have between three and six screens dedicated permanently to Bollywood films. Odeon is also opening a new cinema complex next month between Bradford and Leeds that will "mix Bollywood with Hollywood" and hire a resident "Bollywood film fanatic" to advise and enthuse audiences. British actors are now keen to appear in Bollywood productions. Sally Whittaker, the Coronation Street actress, recently travelled to Bangalore to appear in the Bollywood film "Ek Alag Mausam" or A Different Season Emma Cochrane, editor of Empire, the film magazine, said Bollywood was looking more and more at British and American talent. She said: "Bollywood films often take more than £1 million at the box office and cinemas are increasingly dedicating screens to them. There's an audience of about two million Asians in Britain and they're becoming more vocal." Indian free ISP plans IPO CALCUTTA, India (Reuters) - India's first free Internet service provider, Caltiger.com Ltd., plans to raise about $100 million in October with its initial public offering (IPO) abroad, Chairman Joe Silva said Tuesday. "It will be between Oct. 15 and Oct. 30, on the Nasdaq or the London Stock Exchange," Silva told reporters in Calcutta. Silva said the IPO will help finance its plans to build a 6,250-mile fiber optic network to serve as the backbone for large e-commerce operations and free Internet access in 100 Indian cities. The company's aggressive marketing has helped it increase its subscriber base to 200,000 from only 14,000 on March 25, when it started offering free Internet access. "We are growing at an exponential rate and hope to reach the one-million mark by the end of the year," a company statement said. Silva said this had attracted advertisers, making its operations profitable since last month. "This year (April-March), on the lower side, we expect a profit of 200 million rupees (about $4.5 million)". He said advertising banners on its portal are attracting 10 million rupees (about $225,000) a month. "Our strength is our narrow-banding technology, which allows us to target advertisements to a subscriber, depending on his profile," he said. "With our technology, an advertisement for lipsticks will reach only women subscribers." He added that the company is in talks with Internet service providers in several countries to transfer the "narrow-banding" technology, for which it has filed a patent application. The company has paid-up capital of 350 million rupees (about $7.9 million), which will be raised to 500 million rupees (about $11.2 million) before the planned IPO in October, he said. Its debts amount to 90 million rupees ($2 million), primarily from India's largest term lender, Industrial Development Bank of India, which recently picked up a 1 percent stake in the company. Silva did not reveal the price of the shares. Caltiger.com's debt will rise to 500 million rupees (about $11.2 million) by October, he said. Earlier this year, the firm announced that Spanish venture capital firm Transatlantic Corp. had acquired a 20 percent stake in the company, putting its valuation at 10 billion rupees (about $225 million). Its promoters have a stake of 58 percent, the balance is distributed between employees and Calcutta-based Smifs Capital Markets Ltd. Indian unveils world's fastest SRAM chip A GRADUATE from the Indian Institute of Technology, who is a researcher with IBM, has been instrumental in developing what is considered the fastest static random access memory chip currently in the world. Rajiv Joshi, a product of IIT, Mumbai, unveiled the chip at the VLSI Circuits Symposium in Honolulu, Hawaii. The speed and efficiency of the SRAM is due to the chip design that uses IBM's CMOS technology with copper interconnects. The new design speeds access to machine instructions in the level one (L1) cache to more than 2 gigahertz (GHz). Currently reported cache SRAMs function below 1.2 GHz with an access time of 600 picoseconds (billionth of a second) and more. The embedded cache SRAM holds data that is frequently accessed by the CPU (central processing unit) so that it is immediately available to the processor. Joshi's paper at the symposium outlined the new embedded SRAM which performs at 34 kilobytes with a read access time below 430 picoseconds and a frequency of 2 GHz. IBM contends that with the higher speed SRAM macro, the CPU avoids the roadblocks of traditional cache memory and can access frequently used data and instructions quickly. The feasibility of this design has been demonstrated by IBM labs in Yorktown Heights, where Joshi works, and Poughkeepsie, New York, and is expected to be incorporated into chips powering future generations of S/390 servers. A researcher at IBM's Thomas J Watson Research Centre, Joshi has an MS degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in Mechanical/Electrical engineering from Columbia University, New York. He has won 15 invention plateau achievement awards from IBM and two patent portfolio awards for cross-licensing and utilisation of his patents in IBM products. He has also received four research division awards. Currently, he holds some 38 US patents in addition to several pending ones. Joshi has authored and co-authored more than 80 research papers. He is a master inventor at IBM Research. - IANS NIIT, Sun tie-up for e-commerce BOMBAY, June 15 (Reuters) - Indian computer education and software firm NIIT Ltd said on Thursday it had signed an agreement with Sun Microsystems Inc to develop e-business solutions. NIIT said in a statement it will bring its software development processes and experience for offering e-business solutions using Sun's leading technologies and architecture. |
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