Management Aptitude Test Feb 2012 Paper

The Indian diaspora has come out of the shadows in recent years, and its largely forgotten history, which encompasses narratives of displacement, migration, the cross-fertilization of ideas, and the emergence of new cultural forms and practices, is increasingly being viewed as an important and intrinsic part of the story of late modernity and humanity’s drift towards globalization, transnational economic and cultural exchanges, and hybrid forms of political, cultural, and social identity. South Asians have transformed the face of the country that once colonized them, and in ‘Balti Britain’, chicken tikka masala has become, and not a moment too soon in a country notorious for its own impoverished culinary traditions, the national dish. Indian food provides the assurance that one no longer has to eat an English breakfast three times a day, as Somerset Maugham maintained, in order to eat well. In the 1990s, Trinidad and Fiji both saw the emergence, though scarcely without misgivings on the part of considerable segments of their population, of Prime Ministers of Indian descent. Meanwhile, software engineers were bringing Indians into the top echelons of the American corporate world, and graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology were being courted the world over. Once upon a time Indians were devouring the novels of Walter Scott and Charles Dickens; now, both the novel, and the English language, have been enlivened in the hands of South Asian writers of the diaspora - Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, VS Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul, Vassanji, Harold Sonny Ladoo, Rohinton Mistry, Anita Desai, and KS Maniam. Even Bollywood, which always had a global presence in the Southern hemisphere, now seems poised to encroach upon territory that Hollywood took for granted. The diaspora is never far from Bollywood’s horizon. These are but fragments of a story that is now beginning to be told of a comparatively small diaspora that has indubitably become a part of world culture.