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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.
There is a lot of inherent peer pressure at this school, Kew said. There's a

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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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