Byline
The editorial collective at Diaspora Dreams.
Part 9 of The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean. A doctor who renounced medicine to write 200 books and train the teachers who carried yoga across the world — the hidden hub of the whole story.
Part 5 of The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean. He turned meditation into something anyone could do in twenty minutes — and for one luminous moment in 1968, the most famous band on earth came to sit at his feet.
Part 10 of The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean. In orange robes before half a million young Americans, he opened the Woodstock festival — the most improbable pulpit an Indian master ever stood at.
Part 6 of The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean. He arrived in New York in 1965 at sixty-nine, with seven dollars and a trunk of his own books — and within a decade had founded a worldwide religion.
Part 11 of The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean. He never came west, gave no lectures, and left almost no record of his life — yet through the Americans who sat with him, he may have shaped Western spirituality more intimately than any guru in this series.
Part 7 of The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean. Raised English from boyhood, he came home a stranger, became a revolutionary the British jailed — and emerged from prison one of the most ambitious philosophers India produced.
Part 12 of The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean. He never travelled, rarely spoke, and taught a single question — yet 'Who am I?' and the silence of the man who asked it reshaped how the West understands the self.
Part 8 of The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean. She wrote no books, founded no method, and refused to be called a guru — yet she drew the century's great seekers to her, and reached the West through the pages of Autobiography of a Yogi.
Part 4 of The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean. A child so ill that doctors doubted he would survive grew into the man Time called one of the 100 most influential people alive — and turned his guru's discipline into the world's most-practised yoga.
Part 1 of Mother Tongues. When labourers from a dozen Indian districts were thrown together on Fijian plantations, their languages fused into something new — a tongue that is now the mother language of a people.
Part 1 of Children of the Girmit. Nearly 700,000 indentured Indians passed through a single stone depot in Port Louis — and their descendants became the majority, and the rulers, of an Indian Ocean nation.
Part 1 of Temples of the Diaspora. In the fields of central New Jersey, a hand-carved stone mandir the size of a cathedral announced that the Indian diaspora in America had come of age.
Part 1 of The Living Gurus. From a motorcycle and a meditation centre in Tamil Nadu, Jaggi Vasudev built one of the most-followed — and most-debated — spiritual brands of the age.
Part 1 of The NRI Money Guide. Three little acronyms decide how an overseas Indian holds money back home — and getting them wrong is one of the most common, and costly, NRI mistakes.
Part 1 of The Diaspora Plate. A dish nobody in India had quite eaten became, in the hands of Bangladeshi cooks in Britain, the country's unofficial national meal — and a perfect parable of how diaspora food is made.
Part 1 of The Crossing. For decades the answer was America. In 2026, with US student-visa refusals near record highs, the world's largest cohort of outbound students is redrawing its map.
Part 1 of Power Abroad. The grandson of Punjabi migrants became the United Kingdom's first British Indian prime minister — and lit Diwali lamps on the steps of Downing Street.
Part 3 of The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean. He never sailed anywhere — yet the yoga practised in studios worldwide descends almost entirely from one intense Mysore Brahmin and the handful of students he sent out into the world.
Part 2 of The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean. In 1920 a young monk from Gorakhpur sailed to Boston and stayed for three decades. The book he left behind, Autobiography of a Yogi, became the West's doorway into Indian spirituality.
Part 1 of The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean. On 11 September 1893, an unknown Bengali monk walked onto a Chicago stage and began, 'Sisters and brothers of America.' The ovation that followed marked the moment India's spiritual tradition went global.
At the 5 June Monetary Policy Committee meeting, RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra doubled the cap a single overseas Indian investor can hold in a listed Indian company from 5% to 10% — and extended the facility to all overseas individuals, widening diaspora access to Indian equities.
Notified on 1 May 2026, the new rules replace the familiar blue OCI booklet with a digital e-OCI record and move every OCI application online. Minors may no longer hold an Indian and a foreign passport at the same time.
The theme for the 12th International Day of Yoga on 21 June is 'Yoga for Healthy Ageing'. Ahead of it, the Indian Embassy holds a session at Washington's Lincoln Memorial on 19 June, with a flagship celebration in Times Square on 21 June.
US F-1 student-visa refusals for Indian applicants rose from 23% in 2015 to about 61% in 2025, even as European applicants faced roughly 9%. The gap is pushing Indian students toward Germany, Ireland and Canada's graduate routes.
A June essay by matchmaker Lakshmi Nagasamudra argues the big matrimony platforms won over the immigrant generation but are losing their children — who distrust profiles in an age of fakes and AI-generated content.
The IOM's World Migration Report 2026 confirms India received about $138 billion in remittances in 2024 — the most of any country, and nearly double second-placed Mexico — underscoring the diaspora's economic weight.
The 2026 Grammy season made it impossible to ignore. Across Best New Artist, Best Pop Duo, Best Global Music Album, Best Global Music Performance, and Best Contemporary Instrumental Album — five different categories — Indian-origin singers and musicians weren't just present. They were the conversation.
Total H-1B registrations fell from 343,981 in FY 2026 to 211,600 in FY 2027 — the steepest year-on-year drop in the programme's history. Indian-origin workers, who account for roughly 71% of approvals, take the brunt.
A USCIS Policy Memorandum issued on 21 May 2026 stipulates that aliens in the United States temporarily seeking permanent residence must return to their home country to apply, except in extraordinary circumstances. The change disproportionately affects Indian H-1B and L-1 holders.
Directed by Lakshmipriya Devi and backed by Farhan Akhtar, the Manipuri-language film 'Boong' won Best Children's and Family Film at the 2026 EE BAFTA Film Awards — the first Indian film to take the category in the prize's history.
The 2026 Tech Diplomacy Global 50, recognising the world's most influential leaders advancing responsible technology policy and digital governance, names six leaders of Indian origin — including the UN's Amandeep Gill and the McGovern Foundation's Vilas Dhar.
A growing number of diaspora families are quietly moving back. The plane is the easy part. The actual return runs through tax-residency arithmetic, customs paperwork at Nhava Sheva, banking accounts that have to be redesignated on a clock, and a hundred small adjustments nobody warns you about. This is the practical map.
External Affairs Minister Jaishankar signed an archival cooperation agreement with Trinidad and Tobago to help members of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora trace their ancestral roots. The Government of India is creating a comprehensive global Girmitiya database.
Texas housing markets that depended on Indian-American H-1B buyers for cash-purchase demand are cooling sharply through 2026, as the new H-1B fee regime and registration drop reduce the pipeline of work-authorised Indian-origin home buyers.
The Government of India has extended Overseas Citizen of India eligibility to the sixth generation of Indian-origin diaspora in Trinidad and Tobago — recognising the descendants of indentured Girmitiya labourers who arrived in 1845. A historic outreach with implications for other long-tail diaspora communities.
Indian study permits to Canada have collapsed from 188,715 in 2024 to 94,605 in 2025 — a 50 per cent drop in a single year. The approval rate for Indian applicants fell from 81 per cent to 28 per cent. Brampton's agent economy is folding; families in Punjab and Andhra are reassessing; the Canadian dream that Indian families spent two decades constructing is being quietly dismantled. This is what the data shows, and what it does not.
Most Indian estates are run on default settings: no will, no plan, no conversation. For the OCI cardholder thirteen time zones away, that default is the slow tax — months of paperwork, frozen bank accounts, sibling disputes, property that mutates into nobody's. This is the part of the law where preparing in advance costs almost nothing and not preparing costs years.
How the Indian tax system actually treats an Overseas Citizen of India — the residency rules that determine what is taxable, the TDS regime that bites every kind of Indian-source income, the DTAA framework that reduces it, the TCS that catches money flowing out, and the 1 April 2026 rule changes that reshape the residency test for high-Indian-income NRIs.
Four pathways into India's best universities for diaspora children — JEE Advanced for IIT, the DASA scheme for NITs, NEET for medicine, and direct application for the private liberal arts schools. Plus the ICCR scholarship overlay, the 4 March 2021 OCI cut-off that splits the rules, and the practical pitfalls.
A practical guide to what Overseas Citizens of India can and cannot buy on the subcontinent, how the 2021 government notification settled the rules, why a Supreme Court judgment caused panic — and what the tax position looks like on the way out.
For the first time in Australia's history, a non-British-origin migrant community is the country's largest. The shift coincides with a rise in anti-immigration demonstrations, including the 'March for Australia'.
Diaspora remittances to India climbed 14% year-on-year to US$135.46 billion, with the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia driving the growth.
On 6 September 2026, the AMARA Hall of Fame Awards became the first Indian and Indo-US-centric awards platform to be staged at New York's David Geffen Hall.
New research from ORF finds domestic Indian founders are now outperforming returnee NRI founders in fundraising — reversing the historic Silicon Valley-fed pattern.
Persons of Indian Origin cards are no longer accepted at India's border check posts. PIO holders who did not convert to OCI must now apply for an Indian visa to travel.
Effective 8 April 2026, eligible foreign nationals can apply for an Overseas Citizenship of India card without completing six months of stay in India.
From 1 May 2026, OCI applications and renewals are paperless. The new fee structure: US$275 from abroad, ₹15,000 in India.
A wage-weighted lottery, a US$100,000 petition fee, and a Congressional bill calling for a 3-year pause: the H-1B is in the middle of its biggest overhaul in a generation.
If he wins, Vivek Ramaswamy would become the first Indian-American governor of Ohio — and the first Hindu governor in United States history.
The United Kingdom's House of Commons now includes 26 members of Parliament of Indian descent — a 73% increase since 2015, reflecting the community's steady political ascent in Westminster.