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162 << Diasporic Entrepreneurs and Digital Media

There are some 2.5 million Desis in the U.S., and the vast majority is
Indian. That may not seem terribly significant compared with, say, 40 mil-
lion Hispanics, but consider how premium a customer a South Asian is:
Indians alone commanded $76 billion worth of disposable income last
year . . . median household income is nearly $64,000—50 percent higher
than the national average. The U.S. has always welcomed the world’s poor
and working classes. India has sent its professionals. 26

It hardly needs to be pointed out that this particular logic of enumeration
papers over the diversity of South Asian histories and cultural practices in
North America. What is perhaps most problematic is the manner in which
these marketing and media reports use the terms “Desi” and “South Asian”
but reduce them to “Indian” in order to conjure a highly educated, well-
adjusted, and affluent demographic. In fact, the 2000 census reveals that
the median household income for South Asian Americans is $50,723, well
below the $64,000 figure that was widely circulated. As a policy analysis
from a South Asian nonprofit group pointed out, while this is considerably
higher than the national median household income ($41,994), “the per cap-
ita income at $21,765 is only marginally higher than the national per capita
27
income of $21,587.” Minor differences like these assume greater impor-
tance when situated alongside data that reveal, for instance, particularly low
employment rates among Pakistani and Bangladeshi women, higher rates of
children living below the poverty line when compared with the general pop-
ulation, and lower levels of home ownership. As Sunaina Maira and other
scholars have documented, “popular accounts of Indian immigration to the
U.S. have tended to conceal harsh realities, painting the Indian-American
community as well-educated, well-adjusted immigrants likely to be doctors,
28
scientists, engineers and business professionals.” And given the relative
lack of research on immigrant communities with ties to Pakistan, Bangla-
desh, and other South Asian nations, the Indian experience tends to inform
debates concerning the South Asian American diaspora.
These differences were set aside in the dominant marketing discourse,
which focused on the experiences and cultural practices of a very specific
class of Indian families to construct a “Desi audience.” This narrow imagina-
tion of the Desi audience, one that flattened out linguistic, regional, and other
forms of diversity in the diaspora, had an impact on programming decisions
as well. A majority of the programs on MTV-Desi relied on content that was
either sourced from MTV-India or adapted from MTV-USA’s programming
lineup. Not surprisingly, Bollywood-inspired material dominated the con-
tent that was imported from MTV-India—programs such as Bollywood on