Parental Pressure To Excel In Studies
- By Sam George
- Published 09/22/2006
Sam George
Sam George is the Executive Director of PARIVAR International - a non-profit initiative to address the needs of youth and families of Asian Indian origin in North America and to the Asian Indian community worldwide. Parivar means family in many Indian languages. Sam George also serves as one of the founding directors of Urban India Ministries
www.UrbanIndia.org Sam George and his wife, Mary have spoken at premarital and family events in many countries. They are parents of two boys and make their home in the northern suburbs of Chicago. Sam is the author of the book “Understanding the Coconut Generation: Ministry to the Americanized Asian Indians." Check out this website www.CoconutGeneration.com Coconut (brown on the outside, white on the inside) is a metaphor for the Americanized Asian Indians. Sam George can be reached at sam@coconutgeneration.com
Coconut generation* experiences tremendous amount of pressure from their parents to excel in academics, which is the story line for a new novel - How Opel Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life by Kaavya Vishwananthan and published by Little Brown (April 2006).
Before Opal Mehta started kindergarten in New Jersey, her immigrant doctor parents came up with a strategy for securing her future. The plan was called HOWGIH or How Opal Will Get Into Harvard. An 18-year-long battle-plan, HOWGIH included cello lessons, language classes, mosaic and welding courses-everything they imagined constituted a perfect Harvard application.
At the end of her high school years, fluent in French, Spanish, German and Chinese, having performed at Carnegie Hall, with a 4.0 GPA, a near-perfect SAT score, all Opal had to do was sail through her Harvard interview-and get in.
But when after going through her impressive file, the Dean of Admissions asked her the one question she wasn’t prepared for-”So tell me, what do you do for fun?” Opal was stumped. Apparently Harvard wasn’t looking for ‘academic automatons’.
The author is a 19-year-old Harvard student herself and signed a staggering $500,000 book deal advance. It’s exceedingly well written and, with its blend of mainstream young American pop/consumer culture with a desi touch, it’s also very saleable (DreamWorks has already bought the movie rights.) This has all the ingradients to become the next ‘Bend it Like Beckham’.
To add to the hype, she has been now accused of plagiarism by the university newspaper Harvard Crimson and the publisher had pulled the book off fthe stores
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Coconut Generation* Coconut (brown on the outside, white on the inside) is a metaphor for the emerging generations of Asian Indian community in Western cultures.
This site evolved out of the book - Understanding the Coconut Generation: Ministry to the Americanized Asian Indians by Sam George and published by Mall Publishers, Chicago. Pls check out www.coconutgeneration.com for more about the book and read sections of the book
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