Escorting this writer into Pasand, one of the dozens of Indian restaurants in the area boiling with desis, Das, engineering manager with Aspect Communication, waves his hand across the room and declares, ``Welcome to Little India.''

Not so little anymore, swear an assortment of American professionals and academics who have tracked the growth of Indian engineers and entrepreneurs in the area. No current census figures are available, but according to conservative estimates, there are over 30,000 skilled Indian professionals in Silicon Valleyalone, and nearly 100,000 in the Bay area.

The last US census in 1990 showed that 32 per cent of the region's total scientific and engineering were immigrants, and Indians and Chinese accounted for 74 per cent, with Chinese dominating the hardware sector and Indians in the software area.

Other guesstimates suggest that a further 100,000 Indian professionals may be employed in the hi-tech corridor on the Eastern seaboard, from Boston to New York-New Jersey to the Washington-Virginia area. They are called the Curry Brigade, and realtors on both coasts joke that ever since the Indians began landing here in droves, the aroma of curry has begun to spread in the region.

While the Indian invasion of Silicon Valley was always being talked about, what really snapped attention to the stealth takeover was a recent study by a University of California academic that showed Indian or Chinese CEOs are running one-fourth of all technology firms in the region. According to a Dun & Bradstreet database, immigrants founded11,443 high-tech firms in Silicon Valley between 1980 and 1999. Says Anna Lee Saxenian, who authored the groundbreaking study: ``When local technologists claim that Silicon Valley is built on ICs they refer not to the Integrated Circuit but to Indian and Chinese engineers.''

Just what dazzling achievers Indians in the US are is evident in the frequency with which one comes across Indian honchos in American business and technology magazines, especially when they rank the top dogs. For instance, two years ago, Forbes ASAP's 100 wealthiest people in the US high-tech industry listed five Indians: Sanjiv Sidhu of i2 technologies at 18th place with $772 million; Ajay Shah of Smart Modular at 48th place with $192 million; Romesh Wadhwani of Aspect in 54th place with 184 million; Mukesh Patel also of Smart Modular in 74th placed with $124 million; and Ken Sharma, also of i2 at 96th with $92 million.

It's an indication of how fast wealth is created in this country that each successive list has different Indiannames. Each year, they are becoming richer too. Last year, when Forbes produced a list of 400 richest immigrants (and that included weighty emigres like Rupert Murdoch and George Soros), up popped another Indian in the top 25: the virtually unknown Rajendra Singh who had amassed $540 million with his telephony business. And this year, when Fortune carried a cover story on the 40 richest Americans under the age of 40, three men of Indian origin made the list: Naveen Jain, 39, of InfoSpace at 12th position with $861 million; Sanjay Kumar, 32, of Computer Associates at 37th place with $335 million; and Mukesh Chatter, 38, of Nexabit Networks in 39th place with $250 million.

Again, it's not just the money, but also excellence. When Forbes ranked the 200 best small companies in US, there again was a clutch of Indian companies: Steve Sanghi's Microchip, Sanjiv Sidhu's i2, Vinod Gupta's InfoUSA among others.

When the reputed tech magazine Red Herring drew up a its list of top ten entrepreneurs in the country, noone in desidom held their breath: there was Mukesh Chatter of Nexbit (he is also one of Fortune's 40 richest Americans under 40) and Desh Deshpande of Sycamore (he of the richest Indian fame from the first story in this series). Strangely, the Chinese do not make any of these lists, but we will save that for another story.

Across the country, there's not a week when an Indian does not make his presence felt in the higher reaches of the technology world. On Wednesday IIT alumni Arun Netravalli took over as President of the legendary Bell Labs, the fount of 30,000 inventions; another IIT-ian, Arun Kripalani, recently became Senior Vice President of Qualcomm. Earlier this year, giant computer maker Hewlett Packard hired Microsoft whiz Rajiv Gupta to head an ambitious effort to establish a new Internet-commerce technology with a set of programming protocols called E-Speak.

In fact, dozens of Indians occupy the higher echelons of Microsoft (Windows 95 was written largely by Indians). Sun Microsystem has somany Indians on its rolls that some call it Surya Microsystems.

The Little India syndrome is so widespread that desis have even confected their own Amerilingo. When desi geeks head out to he Italian eatery Sbarro, they say they are going to Subba Rao. When they order chicken parmagnani, they mean chicken parmigiani. In New York's Solomon Brothers, systems administrator Chetan Roy says there are so many Indians in the tech side of the company that they call it Salman Brothers.

Indian techies have proliferated so much that they sustain two hi-tech magazines just for the community (SiliconIndia and TechMantra) and even spin-off a Desi-made commercial film -- Bugaboo, which opened to modest reviews in August -- on their lifestyle.

(Next in Silicon Valley Saga III: Where Indians Dare: When did a timid people learn to take risks?)

The Indians are coming, the Indians are coming