Despite the fact that he is still considered to be an imperialist, and despite the fact that he himself wrote that East and West can never meet, Rudyard Kipling was perhaps the first intellectual to grapple with the cultural phenomenon of the search for a national identity and the complex realisation what would be known as post-colonial Diaspora. However, it took several decades and another author to give voice to this concern in the modern context – Salman Rushdie and his groundbreaking novel Midnight's Children. It was a long time since 1981 till the publication of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies in 1999 when Diaspora writing emerged as a genre. This paper argues that in between these landmark achievements, Salman Rushdie's sole collection of nine short stories, East, West, makes a perfect meeting point of what happened in the context of the cultural connection between the east and the west, and what was to come, especially in the writings of second generation writers of Indian origin