Star Trek came much later to Indian television, growing up, I was always a big fan of the science fiction stuff, every Sunday morning my brother & I would be glued to the telly waiting for the next episode of “Star Trek”,not even the tantalizing smell of special Sunday breakfasts would get us to budge from our spots. Many, many re-runs of the Star Wars series and the cult movie, E.T later, when I landed in the United States, I was amused to find out that I was considered an “alien”!

Of course, that was not meant as a “stranger-landing-from-a-space-ship” kind of an alien, but it was more as a sedate, ubiquitous immigrant alien. So let’s get to the mundane type of complicated rules to determine – for income tax purposes- if you are an alien, that is, not an U.S. citizen, there are certain criteria you have to examine. Read More