From: rsd@sun033.Berkeley.EDU (Rajiv Dighe)
Subject: Re: Fixation with Tall, dark handsome types
Reply-To: rsd@sun033.Berkeley.EDU (Rajiv Dighe)
Organization: NEC Research Institute
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 92 19:49:03 GMT

In article <w0sntb=.cass@netcom.com>, cass@netcom.com (Diana Tenery-Fisher) writes:
|> (talk, dark, handsome... and inter-racial marriage stuff deleted)
|> 
|> Do you know what the instance of inter-racial relationships/marriages
|> for Indians and Americans is? If it even happens, does it tend to be
|> Indian men and american women or Indian women and american men? Does
|> anyone know of an literature or movies on the subject? Thanks.
|> 
|> diana
|> 
Well, lemme go and stick my neck out on this one.
Based on what I have seen ( and I admit that I havent seen enough
to even start building a statistical model ), I will hazard a guess
that the percentage of indian women married to american men is larger
than the percentage of indian men married to american women.
Why this is the case may be based on the following analysis:
We can divide the Indians in America into two classes:
1) Indians born and brought up in this country:
To most of them, an arranged marriage is an anthema and they
are most likely to find their own significant other.
Given that there are more americans than indians in the sample
set that a particular indian can choose from (in this category),
it is very likely that a larger percentage of them choose
an american rather than an indian as a SO.
Do more women in this category choose americans (I know I am being vague
in the defn of american, but that is for future discussions :-)) than
men ?
It is difficult to say.
Talking to an extremely self-assured 21 year old Yale graduate
on this topic led to this profound observation:
She would never consider marrying an Indian male because she finds them
to be a) more confining in their attitude to the working women,
b) less accepting of equal status in a marriage and
c) far more likely to place an unfair burden on the woman as
far as domestic work is concerned.
If she speaks for all the women in this category (which I doubt
but would welcome inputs), then the above assertion would be true.

2) Indians who came here (most often as graduate students or working
professionals).

Here my assertion follows from a very simple observation:
The three-way ticket is mostly a male phenomenon.
The three way ticket refers to that famous yatra that quite
a few of us have taken in our lives (The original credit for that
term goes to Subbarao Khambampati and Veena Gondhalekar who were
responsible for an extremely enlightening exchange on this topic),
wherein we buy a round-trip ticket to India after having achieved
respectability (De Rigeour defn of respectability : A working visa, a Honda Accord
and a credit card) and interview a large number of potential  life partners
in a short period of time (3 weeks was the number that sticks to my mind)
and then choose one for whom a one-way ticket is purchased  to the promised 
land (hence the three-way connection).
It is almost unthinkable for most female indians studying/working
in this country to go through 
this process.
(This may also have something to do with the free-market, supply and demand
and the fact that there are more fishermen than fishes in this sea :-)).
Since a larger portion of indian females choose their own mates
than indian males (love versus arranged marriages) in this country,
it stands to reason that a larger percentage of indian women 
will find non-indian mates than indian men.

Rajiv-donning-his-asbestos-langot