Er, Are We, Like, Confused Or Something?

I’ve always wondered what trade magazines mean when they call something ‘asleeper-hit.’ 

Now I know. 

While some may think the ABCD flick American Desiis creating not-so-small waves in the puddle known as the diaspora, it’s thenumber of yawns the film generates that makes it impressive.

American Desi, the current box-office darling of Indophiles and ABCDs, isa pathetic excuse for a film and an embarrassing debut for those who expectedmuch, much more of ABCD movie makers (why they did, of course, nobody knows).The movie had been touted as a fresh new look at those who struggle to fit in asIndians in America (or Americans among Indians). 

Instead, we got a predictableboy-meets-girl story line with ridiculous attempts at humor. Written anddirected by ABCD Piyush Pandya and produced by Gitesh Pandya and Deep Katdare, AmericanDesi turned out to be a Bollywood masala film with an American accent.

Not there’s anything wrong with Bollywood. Some of us aren’t ashamed ofour passion for these masala entertainers. But, many ABCDs are closet Bollywoodfans, coming out only when it’s cool to be seen at the latest Aish starrer.More importantly, though, they keep saying they want to make movies foreveryone, crossing ethnic lines, stories with universal appeal. 

So what do theydo? 

They make a movie that caters solely to desis. It’s even distributed bythose who screen the usual Bollywood fare every weekend across the US.

No surprise there. 

Basking in the afterglow of box-office sales, the cast andcrew have fulfilled what seems to be the deepest desire of...er, creative ABCDs:to walk among the stars. Bollywood stars, that is. 

It’s no wonder these kidsget so bent out of shape when their NRI parents push more academic fields likemedicine or law. Poor misunderstood ABCDs. Don’t Mom and Dad get it? Theirkids just wanna be the next Shah Rukh Khan or Karishma Kapoor. And with AmericanDesi, Pandya & Co., the poster-children for ABCD film makers, haveproven just how easy that is to do.

Make a movie and people will watch it, advises leading lady Purva Bedi.Uh-huh. That’s been Bollywood’s motto for decades. From all the hype, you’dthink these American desis would have something different up their sleeves. 

Hardly. 

It’s painfully obvious watching American Desi that the crew didnothing more than just make a movie. Forget about making it well. Thatobviously wasn’t the point. Have camera, will shoot, hey, we’re done!

The film got off on the wrong foot when it suffered an identity crisis ofsorts. When the movie’s title was changed from ‘American Born Confused Desi’ toAmerican Desi. 

For the uninitiated, ABCD stands for American BornConfused Desi - a term used to describe the children of Indians, mainly of thosewho came to the US in the 1970s. Before that, there weren’t enough Indian kidsaround to be called anything. Watching American Desi, some of us nowwished it had stayed that way. On the other hand, the movie does demonstratejust how accurate the moniker is, in general, no matter how vehemently ABCDsreject it.

The movie’s original title was changed because a handful ofvocal-but-insecure desis protested saying ‘confused’ presented anegative image of American-born and/or raised Indians. "We are not confused!"scream most ABCDs when they see or hear the term.

Oh really?

They say it’s our story.  That it's about growing up in the US.Searching for our identity as we exist squished in between two cultures. Thatit's the first movie by ABCDs for ABCDs about ABCDs. That it's about beingconfused. 

They got thatright. 

The makers of American Desi are so confused that they ended upwith a movie about FOBs - the perpetually fresh-off-the-boat Indian immigrantsthat ABCDs can’t stand and hope they don't grow up to be.

But, never mind all that. The title had to be changed so it wouldn’t upsetanyone. That simply would not do. For good little ABCDs, being accepted is muchmore important than some director’s vision thing. Nothing confusing aboutthat.

If anything epitomizes the American Born Confused Desi state of mind it isnot knowing what it is that you’re really about in the first place. It meansletting others define you. It means adjusting your actions, your beliefs, yourvision, even yourself because someone said you’ll have a better chance ofbeing accepted if you do.

This should have been the story. 

Instead we get hackneyed "I hate Indians!"dialogues with bhangra playing in the background.

The story, then.

Krishna Reddy is an American desi boy who can’t stand anything about hisIndian family and life. Freedom comes in the form of that all-Americanexperience known as "freshman year" at college. Poor Kris, as his karmawould have it, he arrives on campus to find that his roommates are all desi -- anABCD Sikh, a FOB Muslim and an Afro-centric desi homeboy. After much groaningand insisting that his name is Kris-not-Krishna, he meets Nina Shah inEngineering 101. Not realizing that her brown skin is desi skin, Kris falls forNina and hormones rage (a.k.a. true love).

Nina is as Indian as an ABCD can get -- she garbas, she watchesBollywood movies, she understands Hindi (but oddly enough, can’t pronounce thename Patel) and even has a sleazy boyfriend she thinks of as a brother, like anynice Indian girl would. Comic relief is provided by all non-ABCD characters -- aBengali teaching assistant, a Gujarati grocery store owner with buck teeth, adrunk "I wanna get laid by an Indian" Caucasian American female, and ofcourse, the Indian parents of ABCDs.

Wait. There’s drama and action too. 

We have that wide-but-shallow cultural gulfbetween Kris and Nina. He says, "I don’t wanna be Indian!" and she says,"You better be Indian or you can’t have me." Kris decides to become Indian(surprise!). Nina teaches Kris a few desi moves and just when you think themovie is over, the sleazy villain boyfriend tries to beat up the now unconfusedAmerican Desi Kris-okay-Krishna. 

After the requisite free-for-all, the Americandesi couple bhangras happily ever after.

(Re)viewers have set the bar pretty low for the movie. It’s not bad for afirst movie, they say, the music is good, and the oft-repeated line, it’s thefirst movie about ‘us.’ The truth is, it really isn’t the first movieabout Indians growing up in the US and the movie barely skims the surface of theidentity issue. And, making a movie for the first time is no excuse for shoddycraftsmanship. Any way you look at it -- from the shallow characters, implausibleportrayals of Indians and the desperate attempts to get a laugh, AmericanDesi makes most B-grade summer high-school flicks seem Oscar-worthy.

But, to an Indian, ABCD or FOB, nothing spells success like m-o-n-e-y and, inthat sense, this film is a hit. ABCDs and some FOBs have flocked to the movieand, for the most part, have found the juvenile antics of its cast of charactersamusing.

Still, what’s frightening is that the film’s makers and many ABCDs seemto believe this is groundbreaking cinematic work.

Why? 

Just because it is madeby ABCDs? 

It’s glaringly evident the writer doesn’t have a clue aboutIndians who emigrated to America. What’s even worse is that the director didn’tlift a finger to find out, screwing up in the most obvious ways possible.

For example, Kris Reddy comes from a very North Indian family. This weglean from the fluent Hindustani Kris’ father speaks and the strains of ‘OmJai Jagdish Hare" (a la Purab Aur Paschim) we hear as our young manleaves home for college. 

Leaving aside the small matter that the bhajan usually isn’t played at a bidai, I’m sure some gushing reviewers will say thisfluent Hindustani-instead-of-Telugu was aclever way to introduce the North/South desi divide (an issue never fullyexplored in Bollywood films, of course). In reality, Pandya seems to have takenthe easy way out. Everyone knows that all Indians in the US are Reddys (orPatels) and everything Indian sounds like gibberish anyway. A little incense,some chanting - whatever - the audience will buy it.

The film’s comedy routines are equally slipshod and cliché. Take theteaching assistant who is unaware the fly of his polyester pants is open as heasks students for a rubber. This sketch, like so many others, is shoved into thefilm, for the predictable audience response. One can almost imagine the moviemakers sitting around drafting a list of must-have scenes - rubber joke, check;desi accent, check...

Kris’ Sikh roommate has a strong desi accent despite being an ABCD likeKris Reddy and some others in the movie. It’s never explained why just thisone ABCD has the Indian accent. Simple. It’s the oldest joke in the ABCD book.Every ABCD knows how hilarious the desi accent is. We cringe whenever we hearour parents open their mouth in public. So how could it be left out? Even ifthey have to put the accent on an ABCD.

Some call this satire, a caricature, entertainment. If it is, it doesn’twork. Not for me. 

This juvenile approach to the identity issue is just one of the reasonswhy American Desi fails miserably. To craft a work that explores such anall-consuming, life-defining topic means having the ability, and perhaps eventhe guts, to hold a mirror up to one’s self. It means having resolved, or atleast attempted to, one’s own Indian-American dilemma (or have the talent totake another’s experience and tell the story). To poke fun at those ‘other’Indians and churn out the same old-same old is easy. To do it badly is eveneasier, as this movie shows us.

It may be near impossible for this new generation of Indian-American filmmakers, for ABCDs, to tell their story honestly, with humor (self-deprecating,perhaps) and sensitivity. There’s too much they want to ignore. They’d muchrather explore a FOB peeing on an American lawn, it seems, neatly tap-dancingaround urine and the real stories of ABCDs.

An honest look at ‘us’ means including characters like the young SouthAsians who trashed a San Francisco hotel recently during a conference (were they‘confused’ or just drunk?). It means dealing with issues such as abortionand eating disorders, not that ABCD girls have horrible Indian parents who wantthem to have arranged marriages. ‘Our’ movie would show ‘grown-up’professional ABCDs at an annual convention playing musical bedrooms, with ourwomen in lingerie running up and down the hotel halls looking for men to sleepwith (were they rebelling against their Indian culture or just horny?). 

Finally,instead of making fun of their accent and religion, ‘our’ story would showdesi parents as they deal with (or deny) the behaviors and problems of theirgood Indian boys and girls.

ABCDs aren’t ready to tell these stories just yet. 

In their rush to jump onthe immigrant-experience bandwagon, they constantly confuse normal teenage crapwith their ‘Indian upbringing.’ So, if they aren’t sure what their Indianstory is, why not just tell a story? 

As Kris asks Nina in AmericanDesi, in the only memorable scene of the film; why does everything have tobe Indian?

Why does being Indian become the raison d'être of so many Americanborn/raised Indians, to the point that it overtakes their identity as young menand women, as individuals? You’re Indian, you have Indian parents, you’veknown that almost since you were born. Get over it and move on with your life. Yourlife.

If only this had been Kris’s story. Because Kris is not questioninghis identity. The entire premise of American Desi is flawed. Kris isabout the only one in the movie who knows what he wants. Kris knows he doesn’twant to be Indian. He knows what he likes and what he doesn’t. He knows he hasthe hots for Nina. He doesn’t care what she is, he just wants her.

It is Nina who’s not sure who she is. Nina who thinks watching Bollywoodflicks means she’s Indian, Nina who thinks cracking a few sticks togethermeans she moves to a desi taal. Nina who comes on to Kris and then, slapshim when he does what she wants him to do, because she thinks that’s what anIndian girl is supposed to do. Nina who doesn’t have a clue about her Indianheritage.

Is there anything good about the movie? Yes. It’s less than 3 hours long.

It also clears up for the audience just what being ‘Indian’ means to someABCDs. It means you can bhangra, you know what naan is and youwear Indian clothes, sometimes.

No wonder they call us confused.