Veena Merchant is a child of the ’60s. She went through the decade drinking pink champagne and smoking colored Sobranies with a long cigarette-holder.

In the late ’50s, she became one of India’s first fashion models when a woman who owned a textile mill walked into her school and picked her to model her products. Within months, Ms. Merchant had set up her own modeling agency.

She led a life of leisure and traveled the world. “We’d go to Rome for a pizza, to London for a wedding,'” she says. Lacking a journalistic background, but with energy and curiosity in spades, she liked the idea of being involved in the media. The ’60s jet set in India included publishers and media entrepreneurs, and she went to work for the Modi Group of Industries, publishers of Chic magazine. The first woman to work for them, she promptly demanded that her entire staff consist of women. Her fresh approach and the unwitting leveraging of her social connections gave her some clout, her ideas caught on, and she became Chic’s editor in chief.

In New York in the early ’70s Ms. Merchant met Gopal Raju, the publisher of India Abroad, who asked her to work for him. She declined but reconsidered a few years later, when she was widowed. It was a break with the old, an attempt at a new life. She was India Abroad’s Deputy Publisher until it was sold in 2001.

In the early ’80s she went to India to help shepherd some of Mr. Raju’s new projects through bureaucratic hoops. Back then, fitness was the new craze, exercise the new must. Feeling deprived of exercise and green salad, Mrs. Merchant complained to her hotel manager, and he immediately placed a small room at her disposal. He also asked if she would consider turning her fitness routine into an exercise class for his similarly deprived American clients, and she reluctantly agreed.

Executives at Doordarshan, India’s first national television channel and still the most watched, saw Mrs. Merchant’s exercise class in a promotional campaign. The next day, she received an invitation for a television series. “I just kept hiking my price,” she says, “thinking they’ll go away.” They did not, and years later, by the power of reruns, she’s still asked for autographs in the streets of India.

Today, she is editor in chief of News India-Times and Desi Talk.

How did a child of the ’60s develop political awareness? “It was Gopal,” she says. In 1994, Mr. Raju, feeling that the Indian-American community’s economic success did not translate into political influence, founded the Indian American Center for Political Awareness (Iacpa). He thought that Indian Americans, most of them highly educated because they started coming to the U.S. under a professional quota in the ’60s, did not understand the workings of the U.S. political process – and ought to be taught.

Mrs. Merchant joined Iacpa and became a committed activist. “My emotional priority is the center,” she says, adding that its main function is to translate economic into political power, and to change how Indian-Americans are viewed.

Hundreds of incidents of violence after September 11, 2001, shocked Indian-Americans into the realization that some of them were seen as fitting a generic perception of a dark-skinned terrorist profile. But they are distinguishing themselves professionally and participating in the political process by making campaign contributions. To parlay these contributions to political influence, Iacpa educates Indian-Americans about the political process. Its Washington Leadership Program, the largest Indian-SS American internship program on Capitol Hill, allows about 15 students a year to participate in an intensive leadership program.

“Without understanding the process, you’re not working the system,” says Mrs. Merchant. “We know this country is the fairest and the best country to be in. Democracy really functions here,” she adds. “I really believe in the way the system works. But there are certain kinks that we need to iron out. It would help us if we knew how to use the political process.”