Kamala Harris Is A Desi At Heart

'I think of that young baby, still in her diapers, balancing with her arms held up by her mother, a Tamil woman wearing a salwar kameez and a dupatta, seated on a stoop,' recalls Aseem Chhabra.

When I think of Kamala Devi Harris, it is not the former district attorney of San Francisco or the attorney general of California or a United States senator or the vice president of America.

First of all I think of that young baby, still in her diapers, balancing with her arms held up by her mother, a Tamil woman wearing a salwar kameez and a dupatta, seated on a stoop.

In my mind she will always be that sweet immigrant child of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father.

In another image Harris is standing on a street corner wearing a white and yellow checked winter coat. Her handsin her pocket and a confident smile on her face.

Her younger sister Maya is standing to her left holding the hand of their mother Shyamala Gopalan.

This time Gopalan, a biologist whose work helped advance the understanding in breast cancer research, is wearing a western outfit.

When I first arrived in the US in 1981, Ronald Reagan had been elected as the 40th president of the country, having defeated Jimmy Carter with a massive margin. Four years later Reagan was re-elected with an even bigger margin.

His Democratic rival Walter Mondale only won one state in the electoral votes map -- his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia.

Mondale was a politically weak candidate, but in 1984 he made history in picking a woman as his running mate -- an Italian American politician from New York, Geraldine Ferraro.

It would take many more years before women from major political parties would be part of the US presidential tickets.

Sarah Palin was John McCain's running mate in 2008 and in 2016 Hillary Rodham Clinton became the first woman candidate from a major party to lead the presidential ticket.

America was inching towards the right direction but other minorities -- especially immigrant communities such as Indian Americans -- would have to wait even longer.

The 1980 census revealed there were only 362,000 people of Indian origin in the US.

There were really very few of us, although there was the rare instance of a Sikh immigrant Dalip Singh Saund -- the first Indian American to be elected to the US House of Representatives in 1957.

The number of Indian Americans more than doubled to 815,000 in 1990, and then again to 1.7 million by 2000. According to the 2020 census there are 4.5 million Indian Americans living in the US.

And suddenly we seem to be everywhere -- from winning spelling bees, to heading tech companies in Silicon Valley to Wall Street leaders, including some who were even convicted of fraud.

We are actors, playing comic supporting roles in sit coms, Hollywood film-makers, including one M Night Shyamalan whose approximately 20 projects have grossed over $3.3 billion globally.

We are activists, cab drivers, nurses and restaurant workers. I have even encountered homeless Indian Americans on the streets of New York City.

And there have been many inheritors of Saund's legacy, in the House of Representatives as well as those who have dabbled with presidential ambitions.

I may not agree with their politics and some Indian American faces have disappeared -- Bobby Jindal being one.

But at least two prominent Indian American politicians, Nikki Haley (whose parents were Sikh immigrants) and Vivek Ramaswamy (his parents migrated from Kerala) are still hoping to find slots in Donald Trump's cabinet should the Republican nominee win a second term.

Harris, a US senator from California until 2020, ran for the last presidential race, but she withdrew rather early in the process.

This weekend Harris was handed the key to the Democratic presidential nomination with Biden's blessing and hopefully his delegates on a silver platter. She did not have to compete in the primaries by herself.

At all times in the past couple of years she was Biden's running mate.

But she has a solid work experience in the Senate and in California prior to bring elected as President Joe Biden's vice president.

That little baby in diapers has come a long way. Four years ago in a video she shot at Mindy Kaling's home (another child of Indian immigrants), Harris confessed that she had never made a dosa.

Hopefully that little detail, perhaps tucked at the end of her resume, has been corrected.

In the same video Harris addressed Kaling's father as 'uncle'. The desi in her is still very much present.

Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff.com