Their names far more than their skin colour identify them as "of Asian extraction" TBH. I guess it's likely that their parents lived in India\Pakistan for not a little part of their lives.
It doesn't matter, of course, because as long as someone has grown-up in Britain they're British to my mind, but there are countless subcultures in Britain.
I stopped commenting on this because I am aware how quickly this thing can get out of hand into a "cultural/racist" nonsense which is far from what my intention was when I first posted on this.
I would still like to clarify, one last time, what I was saying ... although it is difficult to get into some places where corners are well defined (and people not just stay in their own but paint others into the opposite ones too), only two colours exist without even shades of grey in between, and the eye-pieces can't see anything in anyother hue.
Every country has its ethnic stock of one (mostly) or two (rarely more) races. India has the Aryans and the Dravidians, Sri Lanka the Tamilians and Sinhalese wings of the Dravidians and so on. If these form the majority of thge population (as they often do) then they also represent the largest talent pool for sports. Of course there are cases where it is different but not many.
So an Indian side would normally have "ethnic" Indians (the use of the ultra-sensitive word ethnic is what caused the problem to start with but I hardly knew what was coming in response) as the majority in all their sporting ventures though there would be the odd case where, for example, you could see a 2-3 Parsees in the team even though they are a miniscule minority in India. It was understandable in the early days of the game in the country when they were the most enthusiastic, the best organised and probably the most affluent community to take to the game resulting in the first Indian/Parsee team to tour England in 1886. They continued to dominate the cricket and were a force. More Indians started playing the game as it spread from shore to shore and we had a pan-Indian sport. To start with Bombay, Madras and Central India dominated the game but it was only when the North started looking beyond field hockey that the national team started looking more and more a truly representative one did our over all place in world cricket started improving.
Not because the North Indians, and the Biharis etc, were better than the others but just because the talent pool got larger and larger. Today with a billion people with the majority of youngsters devoted to the game we are in a very good position in regard to supply from the "supply chain" as it were. Slightly more visionary policies by the administrators would expedite the process but we are in a good way.
Now suppose. we were to start having more and more Parsees again playing the game and they started making up more and more of the numbers in the India national sides. The point to worry then, if someone did bring it up as I did, would not be because we consider the Parsees less Indian or think that the ethnicity by itself was the issue. No. The worrying bit would be the legitimate query whether the talent pool was getting smaller.
Of course it could be debated that it wasn't or that even a smaller talent pool wasn't a source of worry but to twist the query itself and make the point of ethnicity the main argument is bizarre and convoluted to put it mildly.
PS. Maybe the Parsees is not the best and exact example but the only one I could take from history. Its possible that if and when India becomes an economic super-power we may have "reverse" immigration and have a sizeable "white-minority (lynch me on the use of that term again). Then after a generation or two they started dominating the Indian school, university and national teams in spite of their relatively small demographic size, some idiot , like yours truly, may worry about what happened to the "ethnic Indian" cricketing pool and one expects, not without much I am afraid, that an
idiot and a
false prophet are the milder criticisms he will face.