#M3: Personalized License Plates

In suburbs across America Indians announce their arrival with personalized license plates. If you yourself don't have a personalized license plate for your Camry, Accord, Caravan or Windstar, then at least one other Indian family in your neighborhood or school district does. You recognize them driving the speed limit, their right turn signal blinking for 7 blocks, their bumpers plastered with honor roll stickers and their license plate identifying them by their daughter's first name: ROOPA.

The Indian attraction to personalized license plates could originate from several possible forces. Most likely, however, Indians invest in personalized license plates in order to ameliorate the unhappiness their children feel when they fruitlessly search for souvenir license plates that bear their name at tourist locales such as Niagara Falls and the Bahamas. Sorry Vikas, they only have Vicky, Victor and Victoria.

Personalized Indian license plates come in 3 different forms. First there is the surname license plate, such as SEKHAR. Then there is the child's first name license plate, discussed above. Third, there is the popular Indian icon license plate, such as GANGARVR or REDFRT, which are often misread as "Gang Arriver" and "Red Fart" by non-Indian users of the road.

Another pitfall of of the prevalence of personalized license plates among Indians is that some Indians misidentify vanity plates as those of their ethnic brethren. For example, if an Indian man saw a license plate he interpreted as Musalman, a male practitioner of Islam, he may pull up next to the driver and openly display his Indian solidarity with a thumbs up or gregarious toot of the horn. He may be shocked then when he learns that the other driver is in fact not a Musalman but an enormous Muscleman, as his personalized license plate MUSLMAN indicates.

In the end, however, personalized license plates among Indians boil down to necessity. After all, labels such as JAGARTI, SINGH MD, and S JOSHI 3 help differentiate between the 27 beige Lexus SUVs that pack the Ramada Inn parking lot or the Patel family driveway during Diwali functions, birthdays, Saraswati poojas and Ivy League acceptance Fêtes.