Jai Ho! The years-long wave of immigration from India is creating a rising tide of visibility for Indian-Americans in the United States. The past few weeks have underscored their increasingly high profile: Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal gave the Republican response Tuesday night to President Barack Obama's speech to Congress, while Dr. Sanjay Gupta is under consideration to be Obama's surgeon general. Model and cooking author Padma Lakshmi finished another “Top Chef” TV season, then became the celebrity face for a new Procter and amp; Gamble Co. Pantene shampoo line as well as a Hardee's hamburger promotion. Anoop Desai, dubbed “Noop Dogg,” drew fans with his singing on this year's “American Idol,” and Aziz Ansari was in TV's medical comedy “Scrubs” before moving to a regular role in the upcoming comedy series “Parks and Recreation.” Americans have embraced “Slumdog Millionaire” and the cast of the India ghetto-to-glory movie that dominated last week's entertainment talk shows. Indian-Americans have been one of the fastest-growing and most successful immigrant groups, and US Census estimates two years ago showed some 2.6 million people of Indian ancestry. For years, they have proliferated in the fields of health care, information technology and engineering, with higher education levels and incomes than national averages. And recent years have brought more Indian heads of major US companies – PepsiCo Inc.'s Indra Nooyi is among about a dozen current CEOs. They also are making their presence felt in journalism. Gupta, a neurosurgeon and medical correspondent, and Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, have their own weekend shows on CNN, for example.
