Thanks so much for your thoughtful input, Anoop! You are right to point out that I neglected the very obvious issue of how US immigration policy "selects" for overachivers and how that's likely to pass onto the next generation. And I definitely do not believe that overachivement is at all an "inherent" trait--these things are of course shaped by many levels of social and economic circumstance. I do think, however, that as a minority community there is a way in which we are brought up to believe that it is inherent. And I was trying to open a dialogue in which we seriously question that. Also, I'm not sure that it's as simple as assimilation over a couple generations. That could happen, I agree. But as desis growing up here become more and more connected to trends in India and elsewhere, and start to believe that "Indians" as a group (or at least, upwardly mobile ones) are somehow distinctive, then maybe assimilation will look different over the next couple generations. I address some of these issues in the other episodes in this series, but there's a huge dialogue to be had there, I think. Let's open it up! Many thanks again for listening and writing! Best,Smitha

A good podcast indeed. I do think that although it covered a lot of ground on this topic, it missed a couple of things.

I'm going to make a couple of conjectures here that will help in making the point clear. First of them is that parents that felt successful in a given profession tend to direct their offsprings to the same profession. This is not an indian trait or an american trait -- but a trait in general of all parents around the world. So a very successful businessman would like to have his kids be businessmen and so on. The exceptions to this are those who felt that although they were successful they didnt like the profession in the first place and were forced into it due to circumstances.

The second one is that US immigration policy over the last few decades, as far as immigrants from asia is concerned, has been focused on bringing in professionals with high education. Thus the US immigration policy has dictated the sort of 1st generation indians that are living in the US to a very large extent. Again the exception to this are indians who were able to come to US due to money (businessmen willing to move with a few million dollars) or due to already established family presence in US (via the family immigration route).

Given these two, it is but natural that the 2nd generation indian americans (Not sure if I'm using the term correctly - but I mean the children of indian immigrants) tend to focus on the largely on same or similar professions.

In my opinion this really does not have anything to do with fundamental differences, if any, in the school systems of India v/s US or in any sort of perceived predilection of indian (All Indians in general, not just those in US) parents to push their kids towards engineering, medicine or law.

Again the key to remember is that the slice of indians the US immigration policy chose to bring into US dictates what sort of indians are here in US today and consequently what sort of professions they have and prefer.

Without any study or research, I would venture a guess that it takes atleast a couple of generations for an immigrant family to assimilate into the country. It would be really interesting to know how the attitudes differ from 2nd generation american indians to 3rd generation american indians and so on.