Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky by Lacy Sarah

Author:Lacy, Sarah [Lacy, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-12-21T13:48:44+00:00

TiE members have been so successful that the biggest complaint about TiE today is that it’s too much about self-interested networking among the elites and not enough about uplift. Stil , flawed as it may be, TiE represents the powerful connection that exists between an Indian immigrant who has done wel in the United States and Indians who are stil struggling, whether in the United States or in India.

Aside from TiE, plenty of individual Indian successes feel the same pressure to give back. Some people describe it as guilt—the people who left India for a better life in the 1980s and 1990s feel badly about the family members and friends they left behind, especial y considering the struggle for day-to-day life that stil goes on in much of the country.

But whatever the reason, it’s different from China’s “Confucian bubbles” that contain just close friends and business partners moving around the world like col iding bil iard bal s. Indians seem more like that al -for-one, big, noisy family that fights al the time but also would do anything for each other. Unlike Israel and China, a lot of the money that’s been invested in India hasn’t made returns yet, but more keeps pouring in. In the first quarter of 2010, U.S. venture capital investments in India more than doubled to $259 mil ion. The connection amid the Indian diaspora is a huge reason why. As a whole, the country’s entrepreneurs keep getting second chances that many others wouldn’t.

Education

I was in the slum for only a matter of moments before two smiling kids adopted me as their official American guest. “Come with me! I’l take you! I live there!” a smal boy with a blue shirt and a perfect toothy grin said in Hindi as he ran ahead of me. His quiet friend in yel ow jogged beside him smiling shyly, his jet-black Elvis curl bobbing on his forehead. These kids may have been born in a slum, but they had two things going for them: a cel phone in each of their pockets and a rickety computer terminal by the side of a road.

We meandered through the twisting streets deeper and deeper into the Delhi slum. The kids were trotting excitedly, smacking a cow on the rump, bragging about their tour guide role to a friend, hopping over a pile of trash in the street. At one point they got sidelined playing in a clump of unruly trees. The boy in blue, who did al the talking, pointed to the trees, looked at me, and careful y said in English, “jungle.”

But we had a destination in mind: a row of computers set into a kiosk by the side of the road. These two boys had spent the last five years whiling away free hours there, playing games and learning English, math, and science. The boy in blue had learned computers from his older brother and liked to show off. He told me in Hindi when we first met: “I know computers quite well.

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