Maya Americana

Finally people are awakening from the Great American Dream - For more and more Indians this place has now become the official graveyard of broken materialistic hopes, dreams and aspirations. Many came here hoping to somehow settle down, especially the former H1-B brat-brag pack.

This was the only practical get-rich scheme for some Indians which actually worked well: come to USA, make more money than your father ever dreamt of, drive expensive cars and lead a hi-life where you don't have to worry about the basic necessities of life. For a long time the H1 bees were the most sought- after people as cleverly yet sarcastically depicted in Hyderbad Blues. Getting the American Green Card was the highest glory that you can achieve combined with a job at a start-up going IPO with stock options to boot. Heaven couldn’t be closer but alas, all superficial things have to come to an end and end it came to.

The self-proclaimed glory was predictably short-lived. Dot-coms crashed all over the place; good companies which jumped onto the bandwagon found themselves stranded; large inventories were rotting; "Dot-com" became from a sought-after tag to a dirty four-letter word - it didn't take too long to go from dot-com to dot-gone like premature ej&*&*&tion. Like the Sun CEO Scott McNealy says, “Now a days, a dot com is defined as a company whose net corporate value is lesser than the net value of it’s parking lot”. All this was also attributed to the Twenty Second Amendment that led to the Florida controversy over the 25 electoral votes.

The most interesting aspect has the evolving attitude of people - from "its something which happens to others" (like death) to watching their friends getting laid off, to finally accepting the inevitable themselves. Suddenly people found themselves without medical insurance, with liabilities of leased BMWs and credit cards. The flip side of the market economy, of recession in a capitalistic country, not to mention the out of status H1 tag, the pariah of the Indian marriage market.

Still many tend to cling on to the Dream tenaciously, like limpets on sand. Most of those who came here never have/had an intention of going back though they manage to conceal this like a charm. Many can’t reconcile to the fact that without a job its a lost cause here…there are no safety nets for bees in USA…yes, you have to pay your Social Security tax but you are not going to get any support if you lose your job. Still they continue to illegally hold on to the dream as if their return to India will be envisaged as a major failure. Their mere existence and their brand value will crash down the abyss.

Unfortunately, the situation continues and to add to the misery, Osama has given another push on what is now being called the 9-11, the date of the attack and also the emergency police number। With a meager $2.5 Billion a month being spent on the so called war and the continuing and the Anthrax scare, people are jittery, the market is jittery and no one wants to be on a plane. The “Oil’s well that ends well” expression from “Dude Where’s My Country” by Michael Moore is an accurate depiction of this. God Bless America, the land of the free (???)


Bhavesh Lakhani