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The cultural isolation that immigrants from India often experience in the United States has proven acute enough, over the years, to give rise to a telling stereotype.
An ABCD, as they are known among Indians, is an American-born confused Desi -- a person of Indian descent considered too willing to spurn old country ways in favor of American-style temptations, like casual dating or cheeseburgers.
"You have to understand how difficult it was for people a generation ago to come to this country," said Ashul Govil, a high school senior from Chantilly whose India-born parents immigrated here.
"India is such a very different place -- the marriages are arranged, the major religion is Hinduism -- and then they came to this place where there were very few people like them."
That is changing. Even in an era of vast migration to the United States, this statistic stands out in the 2000 Census: The number of Indians in the Washington area, as in the nation, doubled in the past decade.
Attributable in part to the U.S. high-tech industry's demand for skilled workers, the region's Indian population has swelled by unexpected proportions, from 38,000 in 1990 to more than 78,000 in 2000, apparently becoming the most populous Asian group in the area.
Nationally, their numbers have grown from 800,000 in 1990 to more than 1.6 million.
As a result, some Indians say, the cultural strains once felt by immigrants and their children have eased enough to render the idea of an ABCD, if not obsolete, then certainly less compelling.
Govil and his family worship at a Hindu temple built two years ago in Springfield. He and his friends can see Hindi movies at Loehmann's Cinema in Falls Church. And they listen, some fanatically, to bhangra, a traditional Punjabi music that in recent years has been transformed by deejays into a thumping disco sound that plays in nightclubs across the country.
Govil gets his bhangra CDs at the Shivam Music store near his home.
"It is easier to hold on to our roots now," he said. "We use that term [ABCD] less and less."
In fact, said Nidhi Berry, a classmate at Thomas Jefferson High School, second-generation Indians "have a tendency to compete with each other about how Indian we are. A lot of kids, I think, know that we are losing touch with our culture because we are growing up here. Therefore, they feel better than other Indian kids if, say, they speak Hindi better. Or if they don't date, that's another way to feel more Indian, because culturally, dating is taboo."
Perhaps nowhere is the recent wave of Indians more evident than at Rajdhani Mandir, a Hindu temple in Chantilly. Its sanctuary of idols and barefoot worshipers stand as a spiritual anomaly amid the Dulles corridor's new-economy bustle.
Although temple construction was finished only last year, Rajdhani Mandir already boasts 5,000 members, most of them linked to jobs in the high-tech sector, according to temple members.
Many arrived under an expanded visa program that has allowed U.S. companies to import hundreds of thousands of skilled workers in recent years. The largest number have come from India, many from its southern regions. The H1B visa program also has drawn Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and other South Asians to the Washington area.
In Northern Virginia, the hub of the region's high-tech industry, the number of Indians rose from 13,900 in 1990 to more than 36,100 in 2000. The government's profile of the typical H1B worker is an Indian male, 25 to 29, making about $45,000 a year.
Among the recent arrivals is 29-year-old Rajesh Kempasagara, a software consultant for EDS Corp. in Reston. Like many new Indian immigrants, he seems less at ease here than those in the second generation.
He arrived from Bangalore in southern India five years ago, lives alone in a two-bedroom condo in Fairfax City, doesn't date and doesn't really aspire to.
"I would prefer a girl of the same background," he said. "But when girls from India come here, not many come single."
Nevertheless, he could be married shortly. His parents are sending him pictures of available women in India, with information about their backgrounds.
"My parents are going to pick a girl for me," he said. "But contrary to what some people may think, I will have some choices. They make the short list, and then I get to make the decision."
Meanwhile, by networking -- everyone back home seems to know someone in the United States -- he has developed a circle of friends who entertain one another at each others' homes. He is pleased he can buy Indian spices at stores near his home. Maybe best of all, he can even find movies in Kannada, his native language, at the India A-1 Grocery on Lee Highway in Arlington.
Unlike other twentysomethings, however, he doesn't go to nightclubs. He went once and says he is unlikely to go again.
"It's very easy to get addicted and forget the more important things," he said, "like focusing on developing oneself and growing as a person and improving one's software skills."
Leaders of the Indian community discuss immigration in terms of three distinct but overlapping flows.
The first began in the 1960s when students and professionals came by the thousands. Well-educated, they took jobs that helped make Indians one of the highest-paid immigrant groups in the nation.
The second opened up when parents, sisters and brothers of the first group arrived under family reunification rules. Some of them had less education and took jobs as taxi drivers, clerks, small business operators and factory workers.
And in the '90s came the tech-boom influx.
But it was those early immigrants who some credit with setting the tone for a community that emphasizes educational striving, particularly in the technical arena.
"The first generation that came became professionals and has placed a great, great deal of importance on education," said novelist Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, whose first collection of stories about Indians in the United States won the American Book Award in 1996. "They made great sacrifices to make sure that their children are placed in good schools and universities, mostly in technical fields, because they are considered to provide a more certain lifestyle."
"In India, parents have a big say-so in the child's professional choice, and engineering is a reliable field that you know is going to be around for a long time, so that's what they do," said Kavita Khanna, 33, a trustee of the Chantilly temple who works as a systems integration consultant. Indian universities as well as the country's growing high-tech industry have groomed generations of stellar candidates for U.S. employment.
Many come from the prestigious India Institute of Technology, founded in the 1950s by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to train a professional class that could build and manage industrial development projects. Today, the Indian government runs six IIT campuses.
While Indian leaders would prefer to keep some of those graduates in the country, engineers are frequently drawn to the United States by the success stories of those who came before, such as Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc., and Sabeer Bhatia, who started Hotmail.
"People say that in Silicon Valley there are 25,000 Indians who are millionaires," said Reggie Aggarwal, founder and chief executive of Cvent, an event-planning and marketing firm. He said he employs four or five H1B visa-holders. "It's natural that people are going to migrate to where they see success."
About 425,000 workers had H1B visas in 2000, according to B. Lindsay Lowell, director of research at Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of International Migration.
Roughly 40 percent of them, or about 170,000, came from India. Counting their dependents, the number of Indians in this country related to the program is thought to be about 270,000.
"India has become the dominant nation [in the visa program] quite certainly because it has a large supply of computer-trained workers and, quite likely, because prior waves of Indian information-technology workers have successfully established a beachhead in the industry," Lowell said.
He noted, for example, that of the top 100 companies with H1B workers in 1998, 60 percent had chief executives with South Asian surnames.
"Immigration happens through networks," he said.
Embodying the Indian success story in the United States -- and the rise in population -- are people such as Shiv Krishnan, his wife and two daughters.
Krishnan counts himself among the first group of Indian immigrants, arriving from Madras in 1979 as an engineering student seeking a master's degree.
In 1984, he wed. It was a "semi-arranged" marriage, he said, and he brought his wife here. His parents followed, as did his four sisters. Two married Indians here, one came as a doctoral student in chemistry and one as a doctor.
He started his own company, Indus Corp., a Vienna-based information-technology firm that employs more than 200, including a handful with H1B visas, he said. His wife, Meena, runs Schoolranks.com, an Internet site offering information on school quality.
The family is building a brick colonial in McLean -- living, he says, as Americans and as Indians.
This dual life may be clearest in the lives of his daughters, 11-year-old Preeti and 7-year-old Priya.
He and his wife are raising them in the Hindu religion, and the family has a special place in their home for prayer. But Krishnan said they don't get to their Lanham temple as often as they'd like because of a hectic schedule filled with suburban American passions: tennis, gymnastics, swimming.
His girls celebrate two birthdays, one "American" and the other "Indian," based on the Hindu calendar.
And they observe Christmas along with Diwali, the Indian festival of lights.
"I feel blessed to be comfortable in both settings," Krishnan said.
Indeed, the only cloud he sees on the horizon makes him sound like a typical worried parent, only more so: Like many U.S.-born fathers, he fears his older daughter will soon ask about going out with boys.
"Having grown up without dating,
that is going to be the challenge," he said. "I haven't thought about it,
and I'm not looking forward to it."
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