TIME Article on my Town Over the Years

[Teletopez]

I am very much in favor of immigration everywhere in the U.S. except Edison, N.J. The mostly white suburban town I left when I graduated from high school in 1989 — the town that was called Menlo Park when Thomas Alva Edison set up shop there and was later renamed in his honor — has become home to one of the biggest Indian communities in the U.S., as familiar to people in India as how to instruct stupid Americans to reboot their Internet routers.

 

My town is totally unfamiliar to me. The Pizza Hut where my busboy friends stole pies for our drunken parties is now an Indian sweets shop with a completely inappropriate roof. The A&P I shoplifted from is now an Indian grocery. The multiplex where we snuck into R-rated movies now shows only Bollywood films and serves samosas. The Italian restaurant that my friends stole cash from as waiters is now Moghul, one of the most famous Indian restaurants in the country. There is an entire generation of white children in Edison who have nowhere to learn crime. (See pictures of Thomas Edison's Menlo Park.)

 

I never knew how a bunch of people half a world away chose a random town in New Jersey to populate. Were they from some Indian state that got made fun of by all the other Indian states and didn't want to give up that feeling? Are the malls in India that bad? Did we accidentally keep numbering our parkway exits all the way to Mumbai?

TIME

[Hawks Fly High]

This is pretty whack. You would think that a Time Magazine writer would have more class and be less rascist

[Teletopez]

This is pretty whack. You would think that a Time Magazine writer would have more class and be less rascist

I found it a pretty poor attempt at humor.

 

Late Monday Mr. Stein had this to say on his Twitter feed @thejoelstein: “Didn’t meant to insult Indians with my column this week. Also stupidly assumed their emails would follow that Gandhi non-violence thing.” Mr. Stein referred calls to Time’s public relations department, which had no immediate comment.

 

Time magazine said something similar, but much more diplomatically, regretting that readers were offended but not that it had published the article, which we imagine is generating the sort of attention news magazines need in these troubled times.

 

“TIME sincerely regrets that any of our readers were upset by Joel Stein’s recent humor column ‘My Own Private India.’,” the magazine said via e-mail early Wednesday. “It was in no way intended to cause offense.”

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