pass the roti on the left hand side

Indian students in Australia have vowed to fight back against a series of callous attacks they have blamed on racists.

Furious demonstrators have rallied in Sydney and Melbourne, where dozens of assaults have been reported in the past year.

"People got stabbed in their houses, on train stations, on the street and there were petrol bombs thrown on people's cars," said Gautam Gupta, the founder of the Federation of Indian Students of Australia. He accused the authorities of being "too slow" to respond to the violence.

The influx of immigrants from South Asia, lured by the same good schools and suburban-style living that attracted their predecessors, had begun in earnest by 1990. By one estimate, Asians, mostly from the Indian subcontinent, today make up nearly a third of the neighborhood’s population of about 20,000.

The transformation has come as a shock to many of the neighborhood’s earlier settlers, some of whom say they wonder whether magazines tucked into seatbacks on flights between Mumbai and Kennedy Airport advertise homes in Bellerose.