South African Indians at least have a history, Indians in America do not have that, and so they invest in myths of mystical greatness and update them with profiles of Sachin Tendulkar.
Indians livingg outside India sometimes consider themselves more Indian than those left inside. These desi diasporics are members of the FBI, the acronym for "Full-Blooded Indians". I'm an Indian who lives and works in the US but I resigned from the FBI long ago. This past summer I went to South Africa to conduct research for a film about the FBIs in that country.
My findings: When it comes to the fight for a non-racial society, the FBIs in South Africa leave behind in the dust the FBIs in the US. When I was there, accompanied by my film-collaborator Sanjeev Chatterjee, The Johannesburg Mail & Guardian carried a matrimonial ad in its pages that was a little different from those one usually encounters in the classifieds. It read: "Sick of South Africa? USA man seeks single white female, non- smoker, 28-40, to emigrate."
The man who had placed the ad in the paper was a South African by the name of Neil Shuda. When one of the Mail & Guardian reporters asked Shuda why he wanted to emigrate, he replied, "Even Al Capone never attacked a police station—he wouldn't have dared to. Yet in South Africa, people just drive up to satellite [police] stations and shoot cops to death."