3/24/2004 » Rants

Vinod Valloppillil blogs on Jews vs. desis in entertainment.

The realization that you are creating your own subculture, and it is a real, valid subculture, is so key to a sense of belonging. But Vinod's idea that desis will be far more successful in pop culture than Jews doesn't ring true:

• There are already some overtly Jewish pop culture phenoms: the Beastie Boys come to mind. I'm excluding the ubiquitous parodies such as Mike Myers' Linda Richman ('Kawfee Tawk').
• Like Jews, desis in the U.S. don't generate overtly ethnic pop culture in large numbers; the most creative people go into other fields; it's a class thing, there are lots of white-collar desis.
• It doesn't happen if the minority is well integrated into the mainstream. Overtly ethnic pop culture requires some measure of segregation and ghettoization to happen, e.g. Harlem and Spanish Harlem. Otherwise, they simply inject themselves into mainstream pop culture, like Steven Spielberg and M. Night Shyamalan.
• The desi examples he cites are created overseas: Sukhbir in India, the home country, and Punjabi MC in the UK, which has a huge Asian (desi) working class which respects pop culture as a career. You'd probably find lots of hip Jewish music and films in Israel itself.

It'll happen, but it'll take some time. It probably won't happen fully until the third generation, and only if that generation has a large, somewhat segregated, working class component. The distribution will probably be according to perceptions of respectability: Books and screenplays will take up the leading edge, films will fill the middle, and music will most likely trail.

Ironically, if the next generation is highly integrated, this cherry-picking, custom subculture that we've forged out of introspection and heartbreak will be a one-time, transitory, hybrid freak that vanishes within a couple of decades. Its true descendants would be the subculture of new South Asian immigrants to the U.S., and others stepping aboard the worldwide diaspora for the first time.