Once a desi always a desi

I will try doing a Lettermanesque Top Ten Ways of Telling if someone is a desi. No, this is not that regular list (your suitcase has spices, you have a pressure cooker, you apply oil to hair and Ponds powder to face....)

1. Time: Our concept of time and punctuality are so nebulous that our national language Hindi has the same word for yesterday and tomorrow - "kal". Just show up whenever is the guiding mantra.

2. Although we fled homeland and majority of us bad-mouth India, desis are still defenders of the homeland. Does anyone has a doubt? Try to get one of their gora friends to criticize any aspect of desi life or culture and all hell will break lose. If this happens to be in a public forum, well then, the criticizer will learn all the epithets in all the languages!

3. Desis are also extremely enamored of freebies. Every Tuesday we have Techno Expo and several of my desi friends attend it without fail. No, not to learn new technology but for the freebies the vendors give. They return with stress-balls, pens, mugs. I sometimes wonder where do they store these? Will they ever use them?

4. We desis have brilliant minds. We have perfected the science and art of beating the system - whether it is an ingenious way to make free phone calls, watch several movies with one ticket, or hoodwink the usher and take your home-made pop-corn inside.

5. We are generous: We love helping fellow desis in trouble whether it be by offering solicited/unsolicited advice, or by devising yet another strategy to overcome the system.

6. We are probably the most perfect hosts: I think it is impossible to leave a desi's house, even if you came unannounced, without being fed an excellent meal, and if you happen to be single, food to take home for later. This is changing however, especially with the americanised-desis.

7. We are aficionados of conspiracy theories: Fed on rediff.com and times of India (I still wonder where these guys get their news from).

8. Desis are out to get each other: Now this is sort of contradictory to 5 above. But this is very much true. We love each other as long as there is no gora around. May be this is part of our striving to better ourselves - which we were brought up to believe can only happen at the expense of others. So even when this equation no longer holds, unfortunately the dog-eat-dog culture persists.

9. When we talk about desis we cannot ignore our friends ABCDs: These are those who are sitting on the wall and unable to decide between us true desis and the goras. More on this later.

10. We talk like we are representatives of the homeland: You should hear how we talk about Diwali, saree, weather, sweets, marriages - the list goes on!