How to Walk from Mumbai to San Francisco: Saumya Roy Navigates the Cracks in the American Dream

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. Earlier this month, we did a show with Madeleine Schwartz on the United States. She's based in Paris. She was born in the US but lives in Paris. She's the founder of The Dial, an interesting new online magazine which operates out of Paris. They've just come out with an interesting book called How We See It. The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump. Schwartz did the introduction, but the book is made up of a number of essays of contributors, including my guest today, Saumya Roy. She's the San Francisco-based correspondent of Al Jazeera, and she writes an interesting piece in How We See It, comparing, I think, in some ways, her hometown of Mumbai with San Francisco, where she lives, just actually down the street from me. Saumya, congratulations on your contribution, and very nice to have you on the show.

**Saumya Roy** (1:34)
Thank you. Thank you for having me on.

**Andrew Keen** (1:36)
So how do you see America, Saumya? Before we get to your piece and maybe the comparison of Mumbai and San Francisco, in a broad sense, how do you see the United States?

**Saumya Roy** (1:51)
You know, I first came here more than 20 years ago as a graduate student. And I have to say, I loved it, because sometimes as far as we are able to dream, most of all, right, I could see that America was that place that allowed you to become whoever you wanted to be, that you could live a dream, right? I think many of us grew up seeing that dream of America and being here as a graduate student many years ago allowed me to see how you could make your life and yourself and your personality in the way that you could imagine the best for you could imagine the best for yourself and then live it out. And so it really fascinated me in those early years as it does to me, except that as I see it more and more closely, I see that the dream can be fulfilled and the dream can be cracked.
And so I see a fuller picture the more time I spend here.

**Andrew Keen** (2:58)
What does a cracked, it's interesting you choose that word cracked. What does a cracked dream look like, Saumya?

**Saumya Roy** (3:05)
Yeah, just the other day, I was taking a cab in the city and I met the cab driver. He was Indian and I began talking to him and I asked him, well, how did you end up coming here? And he said, I walked from Mumbai to the US. And I think there was a lot unseen in that. So as Indians over the years, we've lived that dream of, what we always see is Indians who are in the tech sector here in San Francisco, who are doing very well, who are the CEOs of many of the big tech companies.
It is the American dream is one where you come and you make an amazing life for yourself. But it's like a wave, right? Like San Francisco is a city which is a boom and bust down. And we always in popular imagination, we see America for its boom, for the great waves of success. But if you get left out of that wave, then you could be one of those, you know, there are also those taxi drivers or so many millions of Indians like that, or people who come here, you know, literally walk whatever their status might be.

**Andrew Keen** (4:19)
I mean, when he says he walked, I assume he meant that symbolically, did he?

**Saumya Roy** (4:24)
Okay, so the way I filled out that gap was to think he literally may have walked through, like, you know, through the border or something like that, if I felt it best not to ask further. But there are a lot of undocumented Indians in this country as well. While we are known to many Indians work in the tech sector and are highly successful, there are many who literally also are undocumented, who come here and do small jobs and crave success and get left behind by that wave. And that to me is a crack. When I came here a few years ago and I would ride the trains and I myself came here thinking that, okay, this was, you know, San Francisco to me symbolized one of the great economic booms of our age. And I thought of it as a city of great wealth. But when I came here and I saw the sidewalks full of or maybe not full, but certainly dotted with people living on the sidewalks, I thought, well, how is it that this is a probably a city that has, you know, that produces, that yields more money, generates more money than the entire economy of India, which is now the most populous country in the world.