diwali
no, it's not that time of year -- but on what would seem like an unrelated topic, who all is familiar with "the office"? my dear sister got me turned onto it (the u.s. version) when i was home for xmas, and now p and i have been catching up on past episodes over the internet. fabulous! we just watched an incredible one where the whole office staff goes to a diwali celebration (one of the characters on the show is indian -- and actually the actress who plays her wrote the episode). indian pop culture references! it had us in stitches -- check it out.
and on a side note, the office aside, why are there so few indians appearing in u.s. tv and movies? east asians became commonplace a long time ago, and bollywood is huge, so what gives? aren't things like ten years overdue?
posted by b @ 1:37 AM
4 Comments:
hmm...not familiar with 'the office' but interesting question -- my hypothesis: I think it has something to do with the complexity of being 'indian' -- India is hugely diverse and complex to begin with - and to typify 'Indian' among all that regional and socio-economic diversity would be like having to typify (for lack of a better example)'european' perhaps, not german, frech, greek, itaian or polish -- just 'european'
And east asians get nowhere near enough airtime to go into all that detail :)
Indu!!! So nice to hear from you!
I agree that there's no such thing as a "typical Indian" - but of course there's no need for an Indian character on TV to typify all of India!
I think it's striking how few South Asian faces there are on TV and in other media - they're even rarely thrown in for "color" in the same (generally badly stereotyped) way that other brown-skinned people are.
did you like the adam sandler-style song at the end?? it had joe and me in stitches! :)
hi P, nice blog here :)
I agree with your observation.
On a related, yet unrelated note, I do feel like there's a growing awareness of indian movies in the US though - a lot of (non-indian) people seem to have mainstream hindi film music on their players - an increasing number of regular movie theaters show indian movies, and i'm surprised by the increasing numbers of non-indian folks who ask me about shahrukh khan :)
There is also a thriving cottage-industry of blogs/webpages/video sharing sites that offer subtitled versions of popular movies and songs as well as translations...presumably the result of an increasing number of indian folks dating firangs (indianspeak for 'foreigner'- usually white)
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