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Don't Forget To Hyphenate Your Label By- Melvin Durai Melvin Durai is an Indiana-based writer and humorist. Born in Tamil Nadu, India, he grew up in Zambia and moved to the U.S. in the early 1980s. In 1995, while working as a reporter for a daily newspaper in Chambersburg, Pa., he began writing a regular humor column. His weekly column now appears in several newspapers and on a number of Web sites. He also writes a twice-monthly column on Indian and Indian-American issues. He is a diehard fan of the National Football League and also likes to run, lift weights and play soccer, tennis and pool. An award-winning feature writer and aspiring novelist, he plans to publish a collection of his best columns. You can write to him at comments@melvindurai.com To read his older columns, go to http://www.melvindurai.com

In an ideal world, all of us would merely be known as human beings or citizens of the planet Earth. But life, unfortunately, isn't that simple and we find ourselves carrying specific labels such as African-American or Indian-American, labels that give us an identity and help us identify with cans in the supermarket.

If you're an Indian settled in America, you may choose to call yourself an American, an Indian, an Indian-American or an Indo-American. I recommend the label Indo-American, because it's a little bit shorter than Indian-American and it will help you have good business relationships with people from Indonesia.

Hey, these are hard economic times and you have to be practical. Why else do you think there are so many Indo-Pak grocery stores? Don't be surprised if your local Indo-Pak store turns into an Indo-Pak-Mex-Thai store.

Perhaps you prefer to call yourself an NRI, which stands for non-resident Indian, or, in the case of many people, non-returning Indian. When my wife calls me an NRI, I know exactly what she means: Non-romantic Indian.

Maybe you prefer a broader label and call yourself an Asian, an Asian-American, or a South Asian. Perhaps you like the label South Asian, but want to be a little more specific, so you call yourself a non-Pakistani South Asian. Or, if you're from Pakistan, maybe you call yourself a non-Indian don't-even-suggest-it South Asian.

Perhaps you like being very specific and call yourself a Gujarati-Texan or a Bengali-New Yorker. I sometimes call myself an Indiana Indian. It has a nice ring to it.

Some of these labels are like domain names on the Internet - they've already been taken by other people. Even if you were born in America, you can't call yourself an American Indian. And even if you live in California, you can't call yourself a West Indian.

We all know who's to blame for that: an idiot named Christopher Columbus. He thought he had discovered India and called everyone here Indians, even though not a single one of them was smoking a bidi.

All because of him, I've sometimes had to refer to myself as an East Indian. And since I'm from Tamil Nadu, I'm also considered a South Indian. Maybe I should call myself a Southeast Indian.

Even better, maybe I should give myself a hyphenated label: Tamil-Indian or Indo-Tamilian.

Hyphenated labels seem to be quite popular in America. Why be just an American, when you can be an African-American, an Irish-American or an Arab-American?

A headline in a recent New York Times read: "The 2 Worlds of Muslim-American Teenagers." Muslim-American? What a strange label. You never hear of Christian-Americans, but you do hear of Jewish-Americans. Do such hyphenations only apply to minorities? Can you be a Christian-Indian, but not a Hindu-Indian?

If your religion and nationality can be hyphenated, what will come next?

Sexual orientation: "Comedienne Ellen Degeneres, who has returned to prime-time television with a new sitcom, says she's happy to be a role model for fellow Lesbian-Americans."

Ideology: "John Davis, the man who sent the president a threatening letter, has been identified by the FBI as a Communist-American."

Physical condition: "Robert Martin eats six meals a day and is proud to be an Obese-American."

Intelligence: "The American Civil Liberties Union is challenging the nation's drunken driving laws, contending that they're unfair to all Dumb-Americans."

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