It's Hard Out There For... An Indian-American Chick-Lit Author?
New America Media, Commentary, Sandip Roy, Posted: May 04, 2006
Editor's Note: When a 19-year-old Harvard student and novelist was accused of plagiarism recently, one fellow Indian-American felt strangely... relieved. Sandip Roy is an editor for New America Media and host of "UpFront," a NAM weekly radio program on KALW-91.7 FM, San Francisco.
SAN FRANCISCO--Dear Kaavya Viswanathan,
I know this must come as small consolation to you these days, as dreams of book deals, film projects and maybe even Ivy League futures seem to wither on the vine. But as one Indian-American to another, I say thank you. I have to confess to a sneaking sense of relief when Opal Mehta's life came crashing down around you. It's not schadenfreude. It's just this relief that finally we can fail, that we can screw up spectacularly and live to tell the tale.
Only we Indian-Americans know it's hard out there for an overachieving Indian-American. It was bad enough that we were the anointed model minority. (Did you know our median income is higher than any other ethnic group in the United States? That we have 200,000 millionaires and 41,000 doctors?) Now we are expected to excel at everything we do. We are the first-class first minority. "Doesn't anyone's kid ever come second in anything anymore?" wondered a friend bemusedly listening to a group of Indian mothers at a potluck.
It isn't just first-class first. It's first-class first at the first attempt. Jhumpa Lahiri writes her first book. It wins a Pulitzer. Arundhati Roy writes her first book and wins the Booker. Salman Rushdie wins the Booker of Bookers. When an Indian kid writes a good essay in school and brings it home, his fond aunt doesn't say, "Well done." She says, "Mark my words, my little nephew will win the Nobel Prize one day."
What was wrong with aiming first for the neighborhood Rotary club essay competition?
There's nothing wrong with a quest for excellence. And I kind of believe you, Kaavya, when you say you had a photographic memory. We do. I don't know whether its genetic or because we have to memorize so much history (the Guptas, the Mauryas, the Tughlaqs, the Khiljis, the Mughals, the Brits), but we do imbibe facts like pictures. We remember things. That's why we are so good at spelling bees.
I mean, we don't just win spelling bees. We do a clean sweep. Last year, all four finalists were our people. Our Bollywood actress Aishwariya Rai can't just be beautiful, she has to be the MOST beautiful woman in the whole world. That's why it was such a relief to see a stoner South Asian in that film "Harold and Kumar." Except Kumar wasn't just a pothead; when push came to shove he was also a medical whiz.
It would be funny, this race to the top, if it wasn't also a race to conformity. And it left very little room for someone who didn't fit into this shiny brown prototype. No battered wives, homosexuals (and other unmarried types) and illegal immigrants, please -- we are Indian Americans. When I quit working in a "goodjob" (for us it's always one word) in software programming to be a journalist, I imagined a kind of hush that could be sensed worldwide -- or at least all the way from my neighborhood in Calcutta to that yahoogroup for the alumni of my old college. "His poor mother," I could almost hear it say.
Your Opal's parents made master plans with handy acronyms for their progeny -- HOWGIH (How Opal Will Get Into Harvard) followed by HOWGAL (How Opal Will Get A Life). And you, Kaavya, wanted to write bestselling chick-lit about Opal and win the Booker and try investment banking. Why, Kaavya, why? We have over a billion Indians in the world. Why can't we leave some things for them to achieve? Instead we just keep setting the bar ever higher. When I was a kid and won prizes at school I would be sent over to the neighbors to display them on some kind of tacky victory tour. It was the most excruciating experience ever -- I felt like some wicked Red Riding Hood bearing grief rather than goodies. There I was bringing shiny trophies to display to the neighboring moms, who would then no doubt berate their less worthy children who had only managed to come in second in the English Grammar test.
But like a demented magpie I couldn't resist the lure of those shiny achievements. More, more, more, shinier, shinier, shinier. Then one year I almost flunked my mathematics exam. It was the best thing that could have happened to me. Paradise Lost. Earth Regained.
Dear Kaavya, it might not seem so now. But one day you might thank Opal Mehta for setting you free. Just call 1-800-HOWGAL-ASK (How Opal Will Get A Life -- And Save Kaavya).
Best Wishes,
Sandip
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User Comments
Preeti on May 23, 2006 at 04:45:54 said:
The least she could do is apologise and admit to wrongdoing. There are times to hold your head high and times to be humble. Trying to keep up the appearances of the model minority is not an excuse to lie, cheat, or steal. There are other ways to garner family praise, if not self-esteem. She has been found out, and it is time to stop hiding from the truth.
Namaste.
Tim Edwards on May 18, 2006 at 07:53:43 said:
Yeah, the more I read about this, the more I think of the classic definition of tragedy:
Where the character--granted--has a character
flaw (hamartia), but, because of cruel fate,
ends up suffering far more than they really deserve, because of their mistakes.
The TrickMan on May 05, 2006 at 05:25:32 said:
She is a cutie. All she needs is a really really good publicist.
Shobhna Iyer on May 04, 2006 at 23:04:26 said:
Just for the record, Arundhati Roy is not an Indian-American. She is a residential Indian, having been educated entirely in India.
Marie Nadine Pierre on May 04, 2006 at 15:35:19 said:
Greetings:
I feel sorry for the poor woman and I think that the media over did it about her plagiarism. I have seen how Indians and South Asians as model minority and smartest kid in classrooms since Junior High. I was shocked too when they internalized this (mis)treatment and befan to abuse others whom they treated as dummies particularly the black kids like myself.
I'm glad that I went to UC Berkeley where the South Asian student population was very mix in terms of their generational status in the US. However, they were all upper class so that set the tone. And for the most part they did act like model minorities and it was a pleasant surprise to interact with those who were politically and socially aware.
I therefore met my first cool South Asians at Berkeley.There were some in my JH primarily from the Caribbean and South America and definetely some in High School from Trinidad but these were New York kids and they were programmed to be cool not smart (only sometimes). At school though they were treated like the smartest kids and some id not handle it well at all.
In terms of the accusations, I read some of what she wrote that sounded very similar to the white lady author and I think that it sounded similar and that she was copying the style and trying to respond in some ways by presenting her version, the Indian American version and that was refreshing. A footnote or endnote would have been fine. The publisher had no right pulling the book. That white guy who had been on Oprah and was found to have lied about some of the incidents in the book sold even more books. I hope that she gets a bigger and better publisher. Too bad she had to go on leave from Harvard. She should have hired a good publicist to clean up the effects of the bad publicity.
I wish her the best.
Indica on May 04, 2006 at 11:08:42 said:
Kudos ! In all this humdrum of voices on the net, all of them trashing and declaring the end of the road, career (and life ) for this very young author, it is indeed refreshing to see people out there who can see and even point to the light at the end of the tunnel, the silver lining on the edges of a seemingly black cloud. I appreciate the humorous effort. I am sure someone as bright as Kaavya has already learnt the error of her ways by now, and hope is a very important factor for young people to live by.
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