Lawmaker getting noticed for heritage

He has been featured on the front pages of two newspapers in India.
COLUMBUS (AP) -- Before his first bill or floor speech, a rookie state legislator who took office this month with the minority Democrats is getting national and international attention from the Asian Indian community.
Jay Goyal, 26, a native of Mansfield in north-central Ohio, is among a handful of lawmakers with Indian backgrounds serving across the United States.
"As the first generation getting something like this, the Indian community is proud," said Neil Patel, president of the Federation of Indian Associations of Ohio.
Goyal, who also is one of Ohio's youngest lawmakers, has been featured on the front pages of two newspapers in India, and his cousins saw his photo on newspapers in an Indian-American community of Los Angeles.
Quotable
"First, they saw one newspaper with my picture on the cover and were like, 'Oh, wow. That's Jay,"' Goyal said. "Then, through the course of the day, they kept seeing my name or picture everywhere, and by the end of the day it was, 'Oh, there's Jay again."'
Indian-Americans make up 0.3 percent of Ohio's population, census figures show.
"It has quite a bit of meaning to me. It's very meaningful for people from that community," he said. "Many of them first came over in the '50s and '60s, had worked hard and been successful in some fields, but politics has been one field that people from that group hadn't necessarily gotten involved with."
Goyal, who attended Northwestern University, planned to get an engineering degree and work for his father's company, Goyal Industries.
His father, Prakash Goyal, came to the United States in 1970 and worked for the Ohio Brass Co. in Mansfield until the company was bought and set to move in 1988. Goyal started his own business and picked up a lot of Ohio Brass work. Jay Goyal became the company's vice president.
Goyal entered politics because he was troubled to see so many of his high school classmates leave Mansfield and Ohio.
"That's a symptom of deeper problems we have in the area and the state," he said.
Several Democratic Party members suggested he run after he served as co-chair of Sen. John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign in Richland County, where Republican President Bush captured 60 percent of the vote.
Winning the seat
Goyal ran last November for the seat vacated by Democratic state Rep. Bill Hartnett, who left due to term limits, and defeated Republican Phil Holloway with 63 percent of the vote.
"He did a really good job of positioning himself so he was favorable to more than one group of people," Hartnett said.
Another Indian-American, Subodh Chandra, the former law director of Cleveland, ran for statewide office last year, but lost in the Democratic primary in May to eventual Attorney General Marc Dann. Chandra, the son of immigrants, created a parody commercial on his Web site comparing himself to the cartoon character Apu on "The Simpsons."
Goyal said he wondered if his opponent or voters would make ethnicity a factor in the campaign.
"It's something we were kind of expecting, but it's something that never materialized," he said. "They saw me as an American. They saw me as someone who was born here, spent my entire life here and wanted to give back to the community. That was very nice."