I (and millions of others) don’t count as Indian Americans

Building Worlds: A Place in the Sun

Direction & Script: Priyanka Kuriakose

Creative Supervisor: Siddharth Kak

Producers: Ministry of External Affairs & Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs

Presentation of: Surabhi

Bottomline: MEA needs to re-define what success means

  

Going by the documentary Building Worlds: A Place in the Sun, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs and the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs does not consider an Indian American worthy of representation unless he is

-male.

-associated with Harvard, Columbia, Stanford or Berkeley as a student or teacher.

-working in New York or the Silicon Valley.

-living in New York or California.

-preferably a millionaire.

The documentary mainly features 'neo professionals': entrepreneur, IT professional. A Hilton franchisee represents the ‘hotel-motel-Patel’ face of the business Indian, suitably upscale.

The difficulty of getting a US visa is represented by a Silicon Valley dude who was turned down three times but eventually got it because his father worked at the US consulate and berated the Consul General. An opportunity available to every applicant, of course.

The three professional females featured are a professor at Columbia University, a Bollywood dance teacher, and a doctor who is shown playing cards with her daughter, not in her professional setting; she can only be recognized in her role as a mother. The fourth female is a wannabe documentary maker who hung out with this crew to learn the craft, or so we were told at the Q&A at Indian International Centre, Delhi.

The creative director Siddharth Kak blithely confessed that they had not considered gender representation (forget parity) when planning the script. They apparently tried hard for an appointment with Indra Nooyi, the Pepsi CEO. Don't know if they even attempted to do so with Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina.

The only person featured who is in public life is Ami Bera, a male. Women who strive to make the U.S. a fair and just society such as Deepa Iyer former director of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT); Kamala Harris, the current Attorney General of California or Bharavi Desai the executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance – Were they all difficult to pin down for an interview?

I guess since Bollywood dance has been represented, it is okay to ignore all other forms of art and culture such as literature (with a whole host of writers to choose from, many of them female) or journalism (Lakshmi Singh of NPR, Fareed Zakariah, and Rajiv Chandrasekharan spring to mind). Not to speak of a variety of ‘non-traditional jobs’ ranging from standup comic (Kal Penn and Asif Mandvi) to cab driver (take your pick in New York).

A photo of Bobby Jindal could be flashed - while he is desperately trying to deny his Indian heritage – but not one of astronaut Sunita Williams?

And there is certainly no awareness of the American geopolitics of 'fly over country' or the ‘forgotten’ South.

There are no themes, no arguments, and certainly no sociological, anthropological or historical perspectives. There is no attempt to situate the community in the larger context of living in the U.S. No mention of the micro and macro aggression that we as Indian Americans overcome, and still live peacefully in our communities (Wisconsin Gurudwra shooting or the case of Purvi Patel testing the abortion and feticide laws).

How difficult is it to access a Wikipedia page on Indian Americans for a more complete picture of who we are and what we are up to?

And Kak bemoaned the difficulty of covering 50 years of achievement in 45 minutes. Really? Perhaps he needs to take a leaf out of another MEA documentary Natyanubhava which gracefully spans 2000 years of Indian dance in 52 minutes. (Disclaimer: The director is my sister Sharada Ramanathan).

This public diplomacy initiative (not a documentary) looks more like an opportunity created to hang out with the "rich and famous" than represent different ways in which Indian Americans have found their ‘place in the sun’ in all parts of the US.

The objective of the MEA may be to make promotional films that showcase the best of India and its culture. If this is a sample of the other 10 documentaries in this series, most of the diaspora can deem their lives wasted, unremarkable and immaterial.