Demographic projections suggest that the next U.S. Census will find more Indian-Americans than American Indians. Any doubts I might have had about these numbers were dispelled at a dinner party I attended in the textile town of Coimbatore–at just over a million inhabitants, one of India’s less substantial urban centers. (Coimbatore is a prosperous city but not quite Mumbai, as I discovered when the global roaming facility on my U.S. mobile phone failed to work.) About 20 couples gathered on the manicured lawns of the British-era Coimbatore Club, all doctors, engineers and business people. Amid the chitchat, it abruptly dawned on me that every single guest had a child attending school in the United States. Several had two or more. The sole exception was a couple whose daughter was too young for college. She was going to take the SATs next year.

When I was admitted to an American graduate school in 1975, I was one of three students from my university class of more than 300 who made the journey to America. Already, though, my counterparts at India’s elite technological universities and engineering colleges had begun to snap up the fellowships that American munificence (and an ever-growing economy) provided. They went on to form the creative backbone of the U.S. information revolution–as it was then quaintly called–fertilizing Silicon Valley with their quick minds and founding billion-dollar companies that changed the way Americans live. (Vinod Dham, to name but one, designed Intel’s Pentium chip; another devised Hotmail.) Their success transformed the image of their homeland and its people. To the American mind, the stereotypical Indian is no longer a snake charmer but a software techie; in corporate and academic recruiting offices, the Indian Institutes of Technology are accorded the same reverence that was once reserved for MIT and Caltech. For an aspiring Indian, nothing succeeds like the success of your compatriots. Today, an Indian student with decent grades has a better-than-even chance of admission to an American university of his or her choice–with a substantial scholarship.

But this does not mean that parents are particularly knowledgeable about such choices. At the Coimbatore dinner party, my sons and I were assailed by anxious queries. What was Wellesley really like? Is Florida State a leading national institution? (They’re experts on Chad, we replied reassuringly to the latter.) Some parents were downright ignorant, especially if their kids hadn’t yet reached application age. Everywhere on our holidays, my twins were eagerly asked which university they would be going to in the fall. “Yale,” they replied proudly, only to be met with blank stares or polite murmurs. “Where is that?” some asked. “I have heard of Harvard,” one matron admitted. This drove my sons into paroxysms of frustration, their Yalie chauvinism being animated by the zeal of the freshly initiated. “Yale,” they repeated slowly, stretching the syllable as far as it would go. “It’s the best college in America.” This tended to elicit sympathetic words and a rapid change of subject. It didn’t help, of course, that in much of south India the letter “y” precedes every word that begins with a vowel. “You are liking Yale?” one gentleman beamed at my sons. “Yexcellent. Yeverybody is telling me Yale is delicious drink, yespecially pale Yale.”

We found consolation at a tourist stop in Chennai, once known as Madras. On a visit to the old British outpost of Fort St. George–an icon of the Raj, and the place where modern Indian history began–we wandered into St. Mary’s Church, a 17th-century place of worship that is the oldest Anglican church east of Suez. There, in a display case, lay a 400-year-old marriage register. The first entry, in curling Elizabethan script, was for Elihu Yale, grandee of the East India Company, British governor of Madras and benefactor of the American university that bears his name. A plaque donated by a Yalie U.S. ambassador to India commemorates the 250th anniversary of the renaming of the College of New Haven for the man from Madras. My sons could not contain their satisfaction as they celebrated this Indian-American educational connection in front of an oil portrait of Elihu Yale in the church vestry. Their joy was only slightly dampened by the Indian tourist next to them. “Yale?” he said to his companion. “Didn’t he make locks?”