It was easier with Gandhi. Now that’s a movie a country and its people can love, wrap their arms around, and shout praise to. Love, peace, and Satyagraha (nonviolent resistance) — they roll off the tongue with an easy lilt that represents the best of what India has to offer.

Not the case with Slumdog Millionaire. There’s the ambiguity. What does it mean? There’s the connotation. The only other compound word that begins with “slum” and easily comes to mind is slumlord. It doesn’t quite inspire you to go out and change the world.

A scene from Slumdog Millionaire

On the surface it appears that India is celebrating the success of Slumdog Millionaire, the unlikely independent, low-budget film that swept the Oscars. Thousands crowded the airport in Mumbai to greet the cast upon their return from the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles. The evening news in the U.S. beamed back images of the film’s youngest stars riding the shoulders of the crowd, their small hands clutching golden statuettes to shouts of “Jai Ho,” the title of A.R. Rahman’s Oscar-winning song from the movie.

But the post-Oscar celebrations and the Western embrace of Slumdog Millionaire mask a heated debate over the movie among Indians around the world.

Listserves for Indian American groups, such as the South Asian Women’s Collective in New York and South Asian Sisters in San Francisco, are brimming with comments about the film and links to blogs written by amateur and professional writers who either praise or condemn the film’s depictions of corruption and poverty. The South Asian Journalist Association (SAJA) has held four webcasts to date to discuss the implications of the movie and the heated controversy it has generated. Rediff.com, the largest Indian news website, has an entire page dedicated to international coverage of Slumdog.

The arguments range from the right to tell the story – India seen at its worst through British eyes doesn’t help the film’s cause – to charges that the film’s producers and British director Danny Boyle exploited the young children in the movie, plucked them from the slums, paid them little and failed to provide additional compensation when the film shot to global prominence.It’s also put the country’s wealthy and new upwardly mobile middle class in an awkward position. The depictions of India’s nouveau riche haven’t been pretty. The New Yorker, in a feature called “Mumbai: Scenes from the Slums,” juxtaposes the story of a thirteen year-old boy growing up in one of Mumbai’s largest slums with the celebrations for Slumdog Millionaire where richly clad Indians toast a movie about the country’s poverty in a posh hotel. The article contends that India’s poor are being pushed out of sight by high fences and barbed wire. A planned skyrail for Mumbail will allow wealthy travelers to literally fly above the slums on their way to and from the city’s international airport.

Even Britain’s Prince Charles found himself in the crossfire of the controversy when he defended the slums as a more viable form of living space for the poor than what he described as the “ faceless slabs of concrete that are still being built around the world to ‘warehouse’ the poor.”

Daravin, the slum portrayed in Slumdog Millionaire, houses 620,000 residents on 520 acres of land. Local residents have consistently fought off attempts by developers who want to demolish the slum and use the land for skyscrapers and luxury condominiums.

That these are the arguments and the facts dominating international headlines about India have many Indians cringing.

T.P. Sreenivasan, writing on the Indian news site Rediff.com, says that some Indians describe the movie as a form of “cinematic terror” against India.

The film is exploitation of the novel, of Dharavi, of poverty, of Rahman, of India itself to titillate foreign audiences. It is the exploitation of the new curiosity about India’s success. The curiosity today is not about maharajas and snake charmers, magic or rope trick, but about the market and the malls, the computers and the cell phones.

The question is whether India is a boom or a bubble. It seeks to reassure the world, as Jamal says to an American tourist couple, when he rolls on the ground after a brutal beating by the police, ‘You want to see the real India? Here it is!’

My own mother had to stop her older sister from walking out of the film. “Chee chee chee,” my aunt had groused, “This is what they want to show in a movie about India.”

Sreenivasan’s son, Sree Sreenivasan, a Dean at the Columbia School of Journalism and founder of the South Asian Journalist Association, defends the film in a post.

The differences between father and son reflect a generational division over what’s an appropriate image of India to give to the world.

As one young Indian woman vents on the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective listserv, “I’ve never been in a country more obsessed about how it is represented abroad than India. There is a TV show I saw there devoted to how the international media was talking about the country.”

Another young woman wrote to me, “I’ve spoken with Indians from India who were embarrassed about the portrayal of abject poverty – why? It’s analogous to the portrayal of the West being a land of isolated, unhappy people. Both are stereotypes but pick up on certain realities.”

As an Indian American I feel as torn about the film as many of my counterparts, unsure of how to weigh the charges of what some are calling “poverty porn” with the validity of showing the true conditions that millions in India live in. It’s as much about who decided to tell the story – a British director with an unsentimental view and an eye for profit — as it is about whether we can celebrate India’s riches and recent success without feeling guilt over not addressing the desperate poverty of millions of its citizens.

A non-Indian friend said to me about the movie, “I thought it was great, but I forgot about it right after I saw it.”

I thought it was awful to watch, and I was haunted by visions of the movie for weeks after seeing it. Despite the fact that I left India when I was four, I feel an affinity to the country and its people, even a slum in Mumbai thousands of miles from where I’m from.

That sense, more than any other, may be the movie’s most significant legacy for Indians. The pull of identity and homeland, even if it’s a generation removed, remains palpable. We, as Indians here in the U.S. or in Europe or back home in India, feel that sense of responsibility and emotional connection whether its one of pride or shame. And it will be Indians who decide whether to use the movie as a catalyst to address the country’s poverty.

Or as the writer Minal Hirjatwala urged readers on her blog, “Don’t just watch. Do something.”

It’s not even close to achieving Satyagraha, but it may be a step in the right direction.

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As if the global economic outlook wasn’t bleak enough already, India now has its own financial scandal to add to the bad news.

Ramalingan Raju, Satyam founder and chairman (Reuters)

What’s known as the Satyam scandal — after information technology outsourcing firm Satyam Computer Services — became big news on Jan. 7, when chairman Ramalingam Raju resigned, admitting the company had inflated its profits over several years and falsified accounts and assets.

The company’s shares plummeted 80 percent and sent markets “on a tailspin,” wrote Reuters’ Sumeet Chatterjee, who called the case “India’s biggest corporate scandal in memory.” The Satyam case has become India’s own equivalent of the revelations about Bernard Madoff’s alleged swindle in the U.S.

Chatterjee wrote,

Ramalinga Raju, founder and chairman of India’s fourth-largest software services exporter, said in a statement that Satyam’s profits had been massively inflated over recent years. He added that no other board member was aware of the financial irregularities at the Satyam, which in Sanskrit means “truth.”

Raju himself said about $1 billion of the cash on the firm’s books was fictitious. Trade of Satyam shares was halted indefinitely on the New York Stock Exchange, while the case was reviewed.

In a letter to his board and the Securities and Exchange Board of India in which Raju made the startling revelations, he apologized for his inability to close what began as a “marginal gap between operating profits and the one reflected in the books of accounts” but grew unmanageable, BusinessWeek reported.

Raju added,

I am now prepared to subject myself to the laws of the land and face the consequences thereof.

The case could have severe consequences for India’s financial system. The South Asian Journalists Association newsblog, SAJAForum, quoted The Wall Street Journal‘s Mohammed Hadi, who wrote, “The whole affair — already being dubbed India’s Enron — throws India’s corporate governance into sharp relief.”

Raju, as India’s Economic Times noted, used to be a “feared” man in the U.S. because of the jobs Americans lost to India through outsourcing concerns like his.

…experts today said the fear seems to have come true, although for a different reason.

“Raju has certainly inflicted a huge blow to the India story on the global business arena and the companies across the world would be much more vigilant before engaging any Indian company for their business purposes,” said an analyst.

SAJA last night conducted an audio webcast with journalists and experts from the U.S., India and the U.K. You can listen to it at this page.

(Image: IBN)

WHAT: From India’s IBN news network: Terrorists equipped with heavy machine guns, including AK-47s and grenades, strike at the city’s most high-profile targets: the Chhattrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) rail terminus; the landmark Taj Hotel at the Gateway, and the luxury Oberoi Trident at Nariman Point. Attacks started at Cafe Leopold, a place popular with foreigners. There were other shootouts at Cama hospital and near the Metro cinema.

From India Times: Terrorists struck in at least ten places. They took hostages at the Oberoi Trident, the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel, and Nariman House.

WHEN: The attacks started around 9.30 pm Wednesday in Mumbai, Wednesday shortly after noon New York time. Twenty-four hours later, as of Thursday evening in Mumbai, (11 am in New York) fighting continued, and explosions were reported at the Oberoi and Taj Hotel.

WHO: An unknown group, the Deccan Mujahideen, has claimed responsibility. India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said, “It is evident that the group which carried out these attacks, based outside the country, had come with single-minded determination to create havoc in the commercial capital of the country.”

CASUALTIES: As of Thursday 11 am New York time, authorities were reporting 125 dead and 327 injured.

SCALE: From the International Herald Tribune: “Even by the standards of terrorism in India, which has suffered a rising number of attacks this year, the assaults were particularly brazen in scale, coordination and execution. The attackers moved against their targets after arriving at the Nariman Point district on boats.”

IMPACT: IBN says: “26/11/2008 will go down as one of the darkest days in the history of Mumbai and India. Life in the country’s financial capital remains paralysed as terrorists hold the city under siege. In a heinous terror attack that the country has seen in recent times, Mumbai came under an unprecedented night attack.”

LINKS: From The Associated Press: “Westerners in India’s financial center were targeted in the spectacular attack comprised of multiple, simultaneous assaults — a signature of past al-Qaida actions including the Sept. 11 attacks. But the Indian attack was carried out by gunmen and not the suicide bombers frequently employed by al-Qaida and its affiliates.”

From The Guardian: Linking the attacks to al-Qaida “was an immediate, simplistic — and probably misleading — response to the attacks on big hotels, seen as western targets, in Mumbai. Certainly, the terrorists appeared to be Muslim extremists. Although they must have assumed they were going to be killed even though they took hostages, the attackers were not suicide bombers, overt martyrs of the kind we have witnessed elsewhere — in London, Iraq, and now in Afghanistan — since the 9/11 attacks on the U.S.”

A FIRST-PERSON ACCOUNT: From India Uncut blog:

…we headed to All Stir Fry, the restaurant in the Gordon House Hotel in a lane down from there. They told us we’d have to wait 20 minutes. We stepped out again, and as we did so, we heard gunshots, and saw people running towards us from the left side.

One of the hotel employees rushed out and told us to get back in. “There must have been an encounter,” he said. “Get back in, you’ll be safe inside.”

We followed him in. We waited in the lounge-bar upstairs for a while. The big screen there was showing cricket. India won. Then someone changed the channel.

That’s when we realised that this was much more than a random police encounter, or a couple of gunshots. We heard that terrorists with AK-47s had opened fire outside Leopold’s, the pub down the road. We heard there was firing elsewhere in the city as well, including in the Taj. We watched transfixed, and as the apparent scale of the incidents grew, we realised we couldn’t go home. We asked if they had a room vacant; they did, so we settled in, switched on the TV, and watched in horror.

The SAJA web site contains numerous links to blogs, webcasts, twitter feeds, and web sites that are following the unfolding story in the Indian city. Among the stories being covered are the economic, political and security implications of the attack.

SAJA says they will offer updated webcasts about the situation in Mumbai on their site at 10 AM and 10 PM EST on Thursday, November 27.

SAJA is also helping news organizations cover the story by connecting news organizations to eye witnesses, and connecting editors to journalists in the area.

Two of President-elect Obama’s early picks for his transition team and White House staff have stirred sharp debate among immigrant and ethnic groups in the US and overseas. One was the designation of Chicago Congressman Rahm Emanuel as the incoming White House chief of staff. The other, the selection of Indian American economist Sonal Shah, head of Global Development Initiatives at Google.org and a former Treasury Department and National Security Council official, to Obama’s transition team.

The choice of Emanuel caused some initial discomfort among two groups: pro-immigration advocates and pro-Palestinian groups. Demonstrating the fine line the president-elect has to walk in choosing a cabinet, Emanuel’s designation was greeted with optimism by Polish Americans, who make up a significant proportion of the population in Emanuel’s congressional district in Chicago.

Emanuel is considered a hawkish pro-Israel advocate — the son of an Israeli father, he served as a civilian volunteer on an Israeli military base during the 1991 Persian Gulf war. This has Jewish advocacy groups celebrating and getting ready to push their agenda in Washington D.C., particularly social issues like health care reform, public housing and welfare. Nathan Guttman and Anthony Weiss, of the Jewish Daily Forward, reported:

Emanuel is Jewishly active — his children attend a day school in Chicago, and during the most tense days of the financial crisis, he asked his Orthodox rabbi if he could take a conference call about the bailout package during Rosh Hashana. (His rabbi said he could.) Emanuel’s moderate Democratic views on domestic policy also put him in sync with much of the organized Jewish community.

On foreign affairs, the newspaper said Obama’s team “is shaping up to be centrist and pragmatic, strong on Israel and likely to use special envoys to deal with overseas conflicts.” The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though, is not seen as a priority when compared to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But what pleases Israel supporters about Emanuel displeases advocates for the Palestinians.

“Israel may well be the Achilles heel of Obama’s progressive pretensions,” wrote Anjali Kamat in Samar (South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection.)

It’s particularly disheartening given the respect he once held for reputed Palestinian intellectuals like Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi. A day after winning the Democratic nomination, Obama told AIPAC that Jerusalem should be Israel’s undivided capital. Now, just two days after being elected President, he named the hawkish pro-Israeli Rahm Emmanuel as his chief of staff, crushing any hopes that the coming administration might have a fairer policy on the Palestinian question.

But Arab American columnist Ray Hanania said he is not worried by Obama’s “growing pro-Israel cabinet.”

He is not going to become a war-mongering extremist as is his predecessor George W. Bush. And, none of his appointments, not even (Vice President-elect Joe) Biden who declares himself a “Zionist,” can ever come close to the fanaticism and anti-Arab hate embraced by Bush’s cabinet of Israel-philes.

Hanania said he considers the Obama team “far more moderate and supportive of a negotiated peace accord, while Bush’s pro-Israel contingent were right-wing fanatics who viewed peace talks as a tactic that effectively delayed peace and gave Israel the excuse to exploit the status quo.”

The addition of Sonal Shah to the transition team also shows how each choice Obama makes can have unforeseen — and perhaps unintended — consequences among a wide variety of groups that are watching him put together his new administration.

Shah’s appointment seemed to go mostly unnoticed by U.S. media, but in India and Pakistan it has caused a stir. The 40-year-old economist, said The Hindustan Times, “has well established rightwing leanings.”

Denouncing those alleged links with extreme nationalistic groups, three organizations of Indian Americans published a statement saying they will increase their efforts to educate “American politicians and business leaders about the attempts by the Hindu ultra-nationalist Hindutva movement to infiltrate the power centres of the U.S. society by giving big donations and through volunteer work.”

Pro-Pakistani groups are not happy, either. Pakistan’s Daily Times quoted Professor Vijay Prashad, chairman of South Asian history at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., saying,

(Shah) was an active member of the VHPA, the U.S. branch of the most virulently fascistic outfit within India. The VHP’s head, Ashok Singhal, believes that his organisation should ‘inculcate a fear psychosis among (India’s) Muslim community.’ This was Shah’s boss. Till 2001, Shah was the National Coordinator of the VHPA.

“Our family has been engaged in community work for ages. (Sonal’s father) Ramesh is associated with various community groups and associations,” her mother Kokila Shah said. “That doesn’t mean we have links with RSS. Such reports might affect Sonal’s progress.”

Sonal Shah, however, does appear in a VHP webpage as a national coordinator of a 2001 earthquake relief effort organized by the group’s American chapter.

Journalist Pilar Marrero speaks at the forum on Deconstructing the Immigrant Vote at the New School. Josh Hoyt, Executive Director, Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and journalist Aswini Anburajan were also on the panel.

“When an electorate gets angry they go out and vote,” said Feet in Two Worlds journalist Aswini Anburajan. “And it’s starting to mobilize people.”

According to Arturo Vargas, Executive Director of the National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO), anti-immigrant laws and rhetoric have been “the driving force” pushing a growing number of Latino immigrants to become naturalized citizens. “It’s out of anger, it’s out of fear, and it’s out of the sense that if they become a citizen and vote it’s an act of self defense,” he said.

Arturo Vargas, Executive Director of NALEO responds to a story by Pilar Marrero on Latino ‘s who are becoming citizens so they can vote in this year’s election.

Speaking to an audience at The New School, where the forum was held, Vargas said Congress’ failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform is also motivating Latino voters. “We saw it in 2006 when millions of people took to the streets of America demanding … immigration reform.” Vargas noted that many of the protesters in ’06 were teenagers who have since reached voting age. “We have now a new generation of Latino youth who have reached the age of 18 in a very politicized environment where their consciousness has been raised,” Vargas said. “They told us two years ago, ‘Today we march, tomorrow we vote.’ Well, tomorrow has arrived.”

It’s not just Hispanics who may vote out of anger. Asian American outrage over a racially charged remark by U.S. Senator George Allen of Virginia played a key role in his razor-thin loss to Democrat Jim Webb in 2006. Webb’s victory gave the Democrats control of the Senate for the first time since 1994.

According to Anburajan, politicians in Virginia “had never considered the Asian population in that state before. And then a man named George Allen points to a kid at a campaign event and goes, ‘look at that Macaca.’ It was caught on You Tube, it became a huge campaign issue.”

The George Allen “Macaca” video.

The “kid” turned out to be a Webb campaign worker of Indian descent who videotaped Allen’s remarks. Within a month, Anburajan said, Asian Americans had raised half a million dollars for Webb’s campaign. In previous elections Asian voters in Virginia had split their votes between Democrats and Republicans, but in 2006 they overwhelmingly supported Webb, giving him the edge he needed to beat Allen.

Feet in Two Worlds journalist Aswini Anburajan at the New School on Sept. 25, 2008.

Will it happen again in the 2008 presidential election? Pilar Marrero, a journalist with La Opinion in Los Angeles, and a Feet in Two Worlds reporter, said anti-immigrant rhetoric–including comments by a number of Republican elected officials across the country–hits immigrants personally. “When you attack immigrants, sometimes people feel you are attacking all the people that look different, that come from a different ethnic background. Or you’re attacking my brother, or my cousin, or my neighbor.”

Marrero added, “Every election we hear the same thing, ‘oh Latinos are very important, they are going to elect the president.” But, she argued, that hasn’t happened in the past. With growing Latino anger over government immigration raids, the faltering economy, and the lack of immigration reform, Marrero said, “this time it might be true.”

In recognition that the real deal-making at the party conventions happens not in the spotlight of primetime but in the backrooms off the convention hall, a morning breakfast yesterday between Indian and Jewish Americans underscored the role both groups hope to play in helping finalize the U.S-India civil nuclear power deal in the coming months.

Arranged by the American Jewish Committee, the breakfast on “Advancing Indian-Jewish relations” focused heavily on the importance of passing the civil nuclear deal not just for the betterment of India’s future, but also for Israel’s.

Allowing India to have a nuclear program would ensure that, “Israel doesn’t stand alone with a bunch of bad guys without having a good guy in the mix,” said Congressman Gary Ackerman (D-NY). “Israel gets cover,” Ackerman said, acknowledging the widespread belief that Israel has a clandestine nuclear weapons program.

While the U.S.-India nuclear agreement is ostensibly meant to ease the import of material needed for generating power, India’s nuclear weapons program has caused the international community to lump the country in with Iran and North Korea for violating or sidestepping international non-proliferation agreements. But Ackerman and representatives from the Indian and Israeli consulate generals said the international community should make an exception for the world’s largest democracy.

Jewish support for the Indian nuclear energy deal has been critical in helping to get it passed by Congress, according to Indian fundraisers and political staffers at the breakfast.

Swadesh Chatterjee, a longtime Indian American fundraiser at the breakfast who has lobbied hard for the nuclear deal, said that the Indian community lacked the legislative clout to lobby for the deal and that support from the Jewish community and Israel supporters had been “critical.”

Ackerman pledged that Jewish politicians and the community as a whole would continue to push for the passage of the civil nuclear deal.

The tough talk on foreign policy was cushioned by stressing perceived cultural similarities between the two groups. Participants repeatedly referred to the notion that Indians and Jews in the United States form a natural alliance and share an emphasis on family, a strong work ethic and a commitment to education.

“We recognize we have two mothers,” Ackerman said of the allegiance that both groups felt for their respective homelands.

Ackerman said that it appeared unlikely the civil nuclear deal will pass before Congress adjourns on September 26^th despite Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice’s statement that it is a policy priority. The deal has to be ratified by the 45-nation nuclear supplier group before it comes back to Congress for a final vote. Ackerman warned that they couldn’t allow the bill to get, “amended to death,” in Congress. He also said that despite the support that both presidential candidates have expressed for the deal, neither candidate would be likely to sign it without re-visiting the agreement.

The EveryDesiVote Application on Facebook allows users to scan their friends to see who has a confirmed voter registration. Users are asked to invite friends who are not registered or who don’t have a confirmed to registration to use the tool to check their status or use an online national voter registration application built by Rock the Vote.

The program is one of several initiatives by IALI, a progressive PAC, to increase Indian American participation in this election as well as a sign of how important Facebook and other networking tools have become to political organizing.

The note to IALI members informs them that Indian Americans are one of the, “worst performing ethnicities to register to vote in the U.S.” Nationwide there are about 1.5 million Indian Americans who are U.S. citizens. About half that number are registered to vote, and actual voter participation among that group is low, per a spokesman for the group.

IALI’s goal is to put Indian Americans on the map as a voting bloc that matters, and they are looking for high turnout among the community in states like Virginia and Ohio where they could have a measurable electoral impact.

Last week in northern Virginia, Indian American progressive activists sponsored a South Asians for Obama event where the Indian American actor, Kal Penn spoke. Penn pointed to the “macaca’ incident of 2006 as an example of how the community could be the key to an electoral victory. In August 2006, then -Senator George Allen (R-VA) called a young Indian-American opposition researcher a “macaca” at a public event. The slur was caught on YouTube and galvanized the community in support of Allen’s challenger, Democrat Jim Webb.

“Thirty thousand Indian Americans live in Northern Virginia,” Penn told the crowd of young South Asians and reminded them that Webb beat Allen, the incumbent, by around six thousand votes.

The use of Facebook and Kal Penn as a campaign surrogate for the Obama campaign shows that much of the group’s efforts so far have been focused on second generation Indian Americans. However, the group is reported to also be conducting focus groups with older Indian Americans on their political views, in order to more effectively reach out to them.

In June, Obama’s Indonesian-American sister Maya Soetoro-Ng appeared at a fundraiser targeting Asian voters in California, where she described Obama’s youth in Indonesia and Hawaii (a state where 56% of the population is Asian-American) in an effort to highlight his close ties to their community. Earlier, Soetoro-Ng’s Chinese-Canadian husband Konrad Ng told the New York-based Chinese newspaper World Journal that Obama was deeply influenced by Asian cultural values as a result of his upbringing. This appeal to Asian-Americans will likely increase as Soetoro-Ng continues to campaign more aggressively in the fall and as the campaign makes a more deliberate effort to engage ethnic media to reach voters.

The renewed emphasis on Asian Americans is part of Obama’s evolution in branding from a “post-racial” candidate at the start of the election cycle- remember his “swift and unequivocal” dismissal of race in November 2006—to that of a multiracial candidate who embraces his multicultural identity. Soetero-Ng acknowledged in an Associated Press interview that during the primary season,“the idea was to downplay to some degree race and ethnicity.” But the national maelstrom created by Rev. Wright’s comments and the burgeoning importance of Latino voters lessens the possibility of the campaign doing so now.

The evolution of Obama’s branding is reflected in the ethnic media’s changing views of the candidate. Editors were initially wary of Obama, due to unfamiliarity with the political newcomer and the resonance of the Clinton name among immigrant communities. During the primaries in February, Ari Kagan, senior editor of Vecherniy, New York and Sam Guo of Ming Pao Daily News lamented that Obama was not doing enough to seek out and meet with ethnic voters in New York.

Now that the primary season is over and the campaign moves into November-election mode, more ethnic communities seem to be claiming Obama as their own.

Many African immigrants have long been enthusiastic Obama supporters, acknowledging his father’s Kenyan nationality and immigrant experience. Indian Country Today, too, embraced Obama relatively early in the campaign, claiming that his Native ancestry might make him appealing to Native American voters. The paper cited his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, where he links his maternal family history to Native ancestors, and describes his “struggle to come to terms with his identity, a story that is familiar to many American Indians of multi-racial heritage living in two worlds.”

More recently, an Asian Journal article quotes supporter Danny Lamila on Obama’s perceived ties to the Filipino community: “He was surrounded by the Filipino customs and our tradition when he was living in Hawaii, not many people realized that. He could only help us and our cause.”

In a Feet in Two Worlds blog post, Aswini Anburajan wrote of the Indian media’s excitement over Obama’s Hanuman (Hindu monkey god) charm, which they saw as an indication of his acceptance or at least support of their religion and culture.

The New York based Bangladeshi newspaper Bangla Patrika, on the other hand, saw Obama’s nomination as an opportunity for Muslims: “We believe Obama’s victory also opened a door of possibilities for expatriate Bangladeshis. Obama is not only black but his father was an African Muslim.” But to clarify that community’s support of Obama is not based on race alone, the writer adds, “Whether white or black, this was not the criteria that won him the nomination, but rather his qualifications…We can only hope that one day such objectivity, quality and experience may bring a Bangladeshi to this great position.”

While enthusiasm appears to be growing for Obama among ethnic and immigrant communities (last week’s Gallup poll found McCain trailing Obama among Latinos by roughly 30 points), the campaign may face some challenges translating this support into actual votes. The New Americans Exit Poll Project found immigrant voters in the 2006 gubernatorial election in New York were slightly more likely to be registered Republicans than native-born voters (14% compared to 11% of native-born voters), and slightly less likely to vote for the Democratic candidate.

Asian Americans, in particular, are not an easily defined voting bloc (their ranks include Chinese, Indian, and Filipino voters); but garnering their support could pay off in states such as Virginia and Nevada, crucial to victory this election year. According to APIA Vote , the margin of victory in Virginia’s 2006 Senate race was only 7,231 votes. The state has 162,679 Asian American voters who could help tilt the balance. The same goes for Nevada where 22,000 votes won the state for Bush in 2004. There are potentially 82,527 Asian American voters in the state, mostly in the Las Vegas area.

In a tight election, as this year’s is predicted to be, small communities that have embraced Obama as their own, could be the tipping point for victory.

Nothing provides a better object lesson for that sentiment than the contents of Sen. Barack Obama’s pockets.

Obama, asked by a woman at a town hall what he carried in his pockets, revealed a handful of good luck charms given to him by well-wishers on the campaign trail. They included a bracelet of a soldier deployed in Iraq, a poker chip, some lucky coins, a Madonna and child, and a small “monkey god.”

A picture of Obama’s palms outstretched with the charms scattered across them made Time’s ‘White House Picture of the Day,’ and the little “monkey god”, Hanuman, caught the eye of many Indians.

The headlines in the Indian press were ecstatic, praising Obama for seeking aid in the Lord Hanuman, such as “Obama Takes Hanuman’s Blessing in Race for White House.”

Some Indians saw it as an embrace of Hinduism, and one erstwhile member of the Indian Congress decided to send a sanctified, two-foot high Hanuman idol to Obama for good luck.

“Obama has deep faith in Lord Hanuman and that is why we are presenting an idol of Hanuman to him,” said Indian Congressman Brijmohan Bhama.

The idol was prayed over for eleven straight days before being packed and shipped to the United States.

“Deep faith” may be questionable, but as the Washington Post reported, it’s making Indian Americans, solidly behind the Clintons during the primaries, take notice.

“They think it’s kind of neat. They rarely see our religion played out in the mainstream media in America,” Bhavna Pandit, an Indian American political fundraiser told The Post.

“In India, they’re like, ‘Wow! The person who can be the president has a connection to us that’s very personal,’” Pandit said.

In her first nationally broadcast radio story, FI2W’s Aswini Anburajan explores how H1-B visas issued by the government are being used in surprising new ways by high-tech companies and their Indian employees in the U.S.

Instead of keeping to the traditional purpose of these visas —as the first step to getting a green card, which allows permanent residence in the U.S.— these workers are now using them to move around the world in search of adventure, corporate advancement and higher pay.

Aswini’s story aired on July 30, 2007. You can listen to it on the Marketplace website.

The story, where she explores some of the challenges faced by South Asian information technology professionals managing transnational work lives, quickly moved to the #8 spot on WNYC.org’s most emailed list. Here’s WNYC’s introduction:

“Many immigrants dream of returning to their home country after they’ve made their fortune in the US. But, for a growing number of highly educated Indian immigrants, the scales of opportunity have shifted. They’re leaving the US and going back to India to make their fortune.”

Press play below to listen to the story.

[Visit post to listen to audio]