[heartwood]

I live in the area of NJ where the typical Indian domicile ranges from a McMansion to a near-palace. (Okay, I know some who live in townhouses and ordinary houses, and some of them are conscious of their relatively low status.) But the Indians I know come from professional college-educated families, often for several generations, and not from shop-owners.

[muawiyah]

Most of them around here (Fairfax County) have much more hardscrabble or politically charged backgrounds. I've known several to build a deck on their homes ~ helped some learn to use hammer and nails, saws, screwdrivers, and so forth.

It was all a manly-man sort of thing ~ they felt no one would ever respect them unless they could do what American men do.