I don’t need to tell y’all that brown people are taking over the world. Hell, desis been taking over for a minute now. One place where you would have thought this would be apparent is here in New York City, where our people are running things across the board, from academia to media to cinema to art to finance to medicine to law to activism to philanthropy to — oh, yeah, fruit vendors and taxi cab drivers (but we do not speak of these). And yet, there remains a class of benighted New Yorkers who have yet to recognize the ever-browning brownitude in which they bathe.

Who are these poor souls? Why, they’re the readers of the New York Observer: the pink-papered weekly with the highbrow preoccupations and the arch headlines and the Upper West Side noblesse oblige; the original fount of the Candace Bushnell column that begat Sex and the City; the paper that crows to advertisers that it “delivers the top of the market: a well-educated, affluent audience of highly influential consumers.” Indeed, according to the sales kit, median household income among Observer subscribers is $162,500; median net worth is $1,546,200; the average numbers are much higher.

Well, in what must be confirmation that we have finally arrived, this lofty set has been officially advised of our existence as of the current issue of the Observer, which features a series of short profiles penned by Nicholas Boston, under the (highly original!) title “India, Inc.” The reduction to India of a group that actually mixes FOBs (or whatever we’re calling them now), ABDs, 1.5s, and people of Indian, Sri Lankan, Pakistani and even half-Dutch origin is but one of the various conflations that y’all sensitive types might bridle at but that, let’s face it, shouldn’t really matter all that much given that we all look the same.

Anyway, now that we exist, at least as some kind of highly literate brown blob, we also need a name. What would it be? Desicrats? Macacarati? No! We are… the Bollypolitans! “A Bollypolitan elite is the newest creative class to kick into New York with art, fashion, literature,” the subtitle announces. And in the first sentence we meet our leader:

In 2000, the Indian-American Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with The Interpreter of Maladies, making her the first South Asian—and, at 33, among the youngest of any ethnicity—to be named in that category. She appeared on The Charlie Rose Show, wearing crimson, her hair gelled back into a chignon.

Charlie Rose! Crimson! Chignons! Shit, this desi thing must be for real. Indeed:

Ever since then, twenty- and thirtysomethings of South Asian descent—that would be Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan—have emerged in a very public way on New York’s cultural stage, and we’re not talkin’ Kaavya Viswanathan. Art centers have been chartered, dance ensembles formed, fashion companies founded—and many more books, both fiction and nonfiction, written and published. Herewith, some names to learn.

So, quick: If you had to pick 12 desis-you-need-to-know in the New York “creative class” (and don’t pick Cicatrix or myself, that would be too easy :P), who would you choose? You can compare your results with Mr. Boston’s incredible advanced sociological sampling analysis here. Discuss!