Ten years ago, in the heyday of Success Culture, the hippie was a cast-off joke, a sad reminder of the unsophisticated times we'd left far behind. Today, the hippie, more or less, is back. What's more, the hippie is Asian.

How's that? Well, listen to the mantra doing the dinner-party circuit. Brothers, sisters, our time has come. Yeah, I know. Pur-lease.

But, hey, children of the Diaspora, what is that sound? It's the avalanche of novels and plays about lives turning all British Asian. It's Talvin Singh's Anokha at the Blue Note, London's club o' the moment, heavin' every Monday night. It's Melody Maker announcing that Jyoti Mishra, Indian indie kid and number one chart-topper, will be "bigger than Oasis".

My mate Anil, who knows a bit about culture - he spells it with a 'k', reckons that we're set to enjoy an Indian Summer. Surfing the net, soaking up the Zeitgeist an' all, he says that British Asians are about to become the new rock 'n' roll.

First, like the Summer of Love in '67, like the summer of Acid House in '88, the summer of '97 will be remembered as a pivotal year in British history - in with a new government, out with the old Empire.

According to the world's media, Brit fashion, Brit art, Brit clubs, Brit cuisine, Brit pop is riding high. "Eclectic and electric" is the phrase bandied around.

How come? Well, it's down to economics. If you're not offered a job, if you're not offered any kind of viable, decent future, if you've really no stake in society, if you've any fight left, you wander off and create your own world, your own future. After 18 years of Conservative rule, it's not surprising that young Brits are so creative. If it's broke, you've got to fix it.

And who's been hit hardest? Us dusky folk. If young Britons have been pushed into creativity, then British Asians, even more marginalised by the centre, have been forced to the forefront of cultural innovation, forced into becoming the avant-garde.

Of course, this isn't down to some innate genius residing within the Brit Asian soul. The equation is simple: Asian youth plus disaffection minus jobs minus a radical political structure times indulgent parents equals cultural achievement of the coolest order.

I blame the parents. British Asians are spoilt rotten. Many of their parents can afford to launch their so-so talented offspring into the creative world, letting them avoid the usual doctor, lawyer, accountant routine.

Jyoti 'White Town' Mishra freely admits this. He told Melody Maker: "Since I left school in '82, I've been regularly employed for a grand total of one and half years. . . mainly I've been doing music and sponging off my parents."

This summer, the trickle of Asian hippies, slackers, Zen opportunists, will go critical, into a flood, pouring out through the (often new) university portals, chucking one-fingered salutes at their professional brothers and sisters.

Hippies are okay. As a five-year-old gazing out at the world from my push-chair, I'd be waylaid by them: skinny-waisted girls with huge eyes, long hair and a smattering of ethnic exotica, dragging along boyfriends wearing ponchos-cum-blankets. They'd catch hold of my slightly startled mother and gush about Goa and freaking out in Kathmandu.

But, as the years passed, the wide-eyed beautiful people took a trip, turned into star dust, and were replaced by thin, world-weary acid heads, talking about nothing but sunsets that never happened.

Watch Monterey Pop, the documentary about the Monterey Pop Festival of 1967, where teenagers with flowers in their hair sigh about how it's gonna be so beautiful, like, you know, a love-in? Then see Woodstock, made three years later, with its legion of thin, wasted youth. Too much dope, acid and heroin.

History repeats. Since 1987, dance culture, the illegal raves and warehouse parties of the rave scene, the world of drugs, dance floors, DJs, has exploded into a multi-million pound business. It's become the dominant pop culture, the soundtrack to every other TV commercial, the inspiration for the way we dress and live today.

This new hedonism has been fueled by drugs, particularly ecstasy. Given the possible long-term mental damage that the drug causes, the current sense of panic and paranoia that runs around the fringes of the pop world - the darker strains of trip-hop and drum 'n' bass - falls into place. We're one totally sorted nation under a groove.

So, people get ready. British Asians, because of mama and papa, because we've little to lose, are riding next season's wave.

As Hakim Bey, the American anarchist-philosopher puts it, we constitute a 'TAZ', a Temporary Autonomous Zone. We happen in the cracks in the map, "outside the cartography of Control". Led by circumstance into launching guerrilla operations on British culture, we're inventing our own history, our own space.

Watch the Indian summer happen - if not this summer, then next. Then watch it collapse - as the counterculture always does. Then spend the years afterwards avoiding maudlin Asian hippies: so sad, so 1990s.