As my father gets older and reaches an age where he needs more help and emotional support than ever before, I am confronted with a challenge that almost all young desis face today: how to juggle our responsibility towards our parents, which is an integral part of our culture, with the many demands of our hyperactive cosmopolitan lives and our focus on the realization of our own potential and dreams. Ultimately, we all find different solutions but the underlying emotional conflict is the same for everyone.

Unlike Western culture which idolizes the individual and self-realization, desis come from a background that stresses the importance of ancestral continuity and indebtedness to our parents. As a friend of mine once said, “Once they have you they think they own you.” There is no right or wrong here but the two ideologies clearly clash and can create very practical problems for a modern desi in the United States.
Guest Blog: Talkback with Sanjay Sanghoee

“As I get older, I find myself trying to rediscover some of the values of our Indian culture which shaped my childhood and still run as an uneasy undercurrent through my adult psyche, but for the most part have been suppressed in the desire to adapt to the New York lifestyle.
As with all value systems, of course, not everything is desirable and it’s necessary to pick and choose the best of both Indian and American values in order to be truly happy.” – Sanjay Sanghoee

“There is a stark disparity between the rich and the rest of India and the wealthy try to insulate themselves from the unpleasant realities of their homeland.

There is a parallel between what’s going on in India today and what we are witnessing right here in the US – a rapidly widening gap between the haves and have-nots and a division into distinct ‘classes’, although in this case driven by economics and not race or culture.” GUEST BLOG

“When Bobby Jindal first exploded onto the national scene in 2007, the Indian community was rightfully proud. A boy genius had become the youngest governor in American history at the jaw-dropping age of 36. The subsequent buzz about him being a potential presidential candidate in 2012 made him into an even bigger star. At least for Indians, he was truly the anointed one. That, however, was then.

Cut to 2009 when he delivered an extremely awkward, meandering, ideologically driven Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union speech. Even people in his own party were disappointed and suddenly there was doubt about Jindal’s readiness for a larger platform.”

– Guest blogger Sanjay Sanghoee

As Galleon co-founder Raj Rajaratnam’s trial

Insider trading scandals have been a staple of the American landscape for decades and while the more sensational ones like those involving Michael Milken and Martha Stewart are legendary, they are only symptoms of a larger disease that is the true bane of the business world – The Old Boys’ Club mentality.

Guest blog – Sanjay Sanghoee