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Comment by psergeant | Hacker News Reader

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psergeant·

I bet the spending power of non-India Indians in the rest of the world is huge.

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"non-India Indians" are called NRIs (non-resident Indians).

And you're right, in the list of ethnic groups in USA by household income, Indian Americans rank number 1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...

Does NRI apply to people without Indian citizenship?

Nope, strictly speaking NRI is a tax status of people who are Indian citizens but do not reside in India.

Foreign citizens who descent from Indian origin are called PIO i.e. person of Indian origin

In banking/government terms, yes, but in general terms NRI is used much wider to describe a person of Indian origin. At least in West India.

Does “Desi” work in this case? Is it offensive for a white guy to say?

Desi is not offensive or derogatory.

I fact, in the US it seems to be used to refer to anyone from the subcontinent, not just from India.

Desi is probably a better term, since NROs, PIOs and non Indian brown Asians are usually target audience for such content :)

Would depend on context, but for the most part it's not at all offensive. In my experience Indians in Silicon Valley refer to "indian things / culture" as Desi all the time.

It might be interesting to know that the Sanskrit word "desi" itself just means country

Many words starting with n and with gs in them are just color descriptions. Shortened versions of Japanese and Pakistani are offensive in some countries but not others. The Thai word for Indian is “visitor” as in “not from here, will go home soon”. Plenty of words with innocuous meanings pick up offensive meanings.

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