Conference encourages unity

The South Asian Student Alliance Conference returned to Penn's campus this weekend after a six-year absence, allowing participants the opportunity to examine the generational and unity conflicts confronting South Asians. The conference encouraged students to overcome cultural barriers and become more actively involved in politics and the arts -- an idea that Brown University junior Monica Madan, one of the 1,200 students from 92 schools who attended the event, found to be of crucial importance. "I came to learn about what the South Asian issues are and how they relate to a voiceless community -- a community who has had one elected congressman since 1960," she said in reference to the 0.5 percent of the United States population who are of South Asian descent. The conference expressed the need of South Asians to more actively involve themselves in the political life of the United States. "The South Asian community is a young one primarily concerned, until now, with economic well-being and education. But the time has come for these new immigrants to begin contributing to the U.S.," former Congressional candidate and Indian immigrant Yash Aggarwal said. Standing in the way of this new political enthusiasm, however, are the long-standing tensions immigrants of South Asia brought with them to America, according to Wharton senior Neal Shah. "People carried these differences over with them when they came and now we don't speak as a unified voice on anything," said Shah, the president of the University's 300-member South Asian Society, which hosted the event. The feeling of community extended to the conference's Cultural Fair in a room decorated with tables filled with students' personal relics and memorabilia from home. On one table devoted to India were a book and a sari, the traditional Indian dress. And on another for Pakistan were records and colorful fabrics designed to familiarize others with the culture of the Pakistanis' homeland. The presence of a South Asian blood-registering organization at the conference depicted the need to find common ground, Shah said. "They will try to persuade attendants to register their blood types in order to provide matches of bone marrow donors for leukemia victims -- this is something that can bring the community together," he said. The great majority of South Asian- Americans immigrated to the United States after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which eliminated the low immigration quotas previously placed upon South Asians and Eastern Europeans, according to College sophomore Vishal Savani. Most of the South Asian immigrants who chose to bridge the steep divide between American liberalism and Indian conservatism belonged to scientific, mathematical and engineering professions, Savani noted. "Those were the only vocations that could translate into American society and function -- that is why most South Asians are in those fields today and that is why their children are pushed in that direction," he said.