The
Spread of Hindus Throughout the World Has Been Going On
for Thousands of Years!
-Gene D. Matlock, B.A., M.A.
On Friday, July 6, 2001, an article, entitled Asian Indians
Remake Silicon Valley, appeared on the front page of the
Los Angeles Times:
SUNNYVALE, CALIF. – The Hindu temple here was one of
the largest in California when it opened in a converted
electronics warehouse in 1994 – big enough, it’s
founders thought, to last a good two decades.
They were wrong. Temple membership has frown from 380 families
to 4,800 as the Silicon Valley’s Asian Indian population
has surged in the last decade, part of an international
high-tech migration that has both repeated and rewritten
the standard California tale of demographic change.Like
other waves of new arrivals, the software workers have transformed
shopping districts, schools and restaurant menus, altering
the very sights and sounds of the place. They have also
punched a hole in the immigrant stereotype of the poorly
paid toiling in service jobs while their children struggle
in overburdened schools.
The high-tech boom drew an ethnic melange of the skilled
and educated from around the world, immigrants with college
degrees, middle-class incomes and children who have often
raised the academic bar in public schools.
…In Santa Clara County, the heart of the Silicon Valley,
no ethnic group has grown so dramatically as Asian Indians,
whose numbers have more than tripled in the last decade
to 314,819, keeping California the national leader. U. S.
Census figures show that of the Asian subgroups in the state,
the Indian population shot up the fastest during the 1990s.
Signs of Indian Presence Abound
Whether it is manifested in bustling temples or weekend
cricket matches in the parks, Indian life has taken root
in this land of software geeks and outlandishly priced tract
houses. There is even a term for Indians who live and work
in the Silicon Valley – ‘Silicon desi.’
Indian restaurants abound. There are Indian video stores,
groceries, sari shops and festivals with parades. The Sikh
temple in San Jose is raising $50,000 a month to erect a
new facility on 42 acres.
The recently opened Naz 8 Cinemas in a Fremont shopping
center in Alameda County show only films from South Asia.
Indian performers stop on entertainment tours…
Fights are not a problem at Fremont’s Mission San Jose
High School, where the student body is 61% minority, much
of it Asian and comes from families working in high-tech
or other professional fields.‘It’s a real unique
place to work. We rarely have discipline problems,’
said Principal Stuart Kew, who has seen the school evolve
from predominantly white since he began there as a chemistry
teacher in 1972.
As the demographics have changed, so have the academics.
The curriculum has become more advanced, because that is
what the parents and students want. Out of a student body
of 2,000, a third are identified as gifted.
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‘There is a
lot of inherent peer pressure at this school,’ Kew
said. ‘There’s a degree of parental pressure to
take the hardest classes. But I think that a lot of dynamics
in the student body are self-imposed. The students compete
against each other.’ (Written by Bettina Boxall, in
passim.)
Let’s suppose that a time machine could deliver this
edition of the Los Angeles Times to some India-Indian immigrants
living in various parts of the world in 5,000 BC or earlier.
I’m absolutely sure that many of them would exclaim:
My God! We can’t believe that 7,000 years after we
left India, things still have not changed – just the
technologies. Natural calamities, The Indo-Aryans overemphasis
on mystical practices, caste divisions, and other repressive
socio-economic traditions forced us to leave our native
land. In the new lands to which we emigrated, the natives
were either lacking in or had rejected the highest of academic
and moral standards. Seven thousand years from now, our
descendants are still regenerating the mental and moral
fiber of the world! When will Mother India ever learn to
keep her children at home instead of chasing us to other
countries to give strangers the greatness that should have
been Mother India’s patrimony?
The Bible mentions this exodus from India, but these groups
are named as individuals, not as the "groups"
they were. The Bible tells us that a man named Javan was
the father of Greece. This word Javan derives from the Sanskrit
Yauvana, meaning "youth; young person." In other
words, some natural catastrophes and disastrous social conditions
became so intolerable that India’s young people made
a mass exodus out of India – as they are still doing.
But weren’t America and Australia also settled in the
same way? Weren’t our ancestors also driven out of
Europe for being criminals, political dissidents, poor,
and the like?
We Westerners must not rant, rave, and wring our hands
self-righteously when we observe the ever-growing Hindu
presence in America and European countries. After all,
this has been going on for millenniums. At the same time,
the Hindus should not condemn us unduly because many of
the descendants of the Yauvanas, such as the British,
Dutch, and Portuguese, once returned as conquerors to
the homeland of their ancestors. Right now, there are
more successful Hindus profiting from the enlightened
economies and cultures of the Western countries than the
number of Europeans who once invaded and occupied India.
As the Hindus’ rapid educational and material progress
in the West later leads them into dominant political action,
will they prove to be more humanitarian and politically
enlightened than the British, Dutch, and Portuguese who
occupied India during the Age of Imperialism? Will they
be able to continue complaining about those "horrible
British?" If we are to judge them by the socio-political,
religious, and cultural factors presently making India
a place to leave – not a place in which to stay –
they are the "X" factor in today’s Western
World. Let us hope that the modern Indians will fashion
the world for the better as their ancestors did thousands
of years ago, when the Mahabharata War caused the cream
of India to look for new homes in the West.
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