It's an old trick, and it no longer makes us laugh.

On late nights when we're trying to get home to Brooklyn, my friend Benjamin and I have a routine. I try to flag down a cab. He stands several feet ahead. I'm Indian, and usually, a cab stops for me. Benjamin, who is black, runs in behind. The driver, who often looks more like me than my friend, is alarmed. He tells me in Hindi of his fear of picking up black passengers late at night. If he's new to the gig, he asks whether I live in the dangerous parts of Brooklyn.

It's an old routine for many. But in Taxi-vala/ Auto-biography, a 45 minute experimental documentary now making the rounds on the festival circuit, Vivek Renjen Bald takes a fresh look at the politics of cabbing it.

At one level, Taxi-vala is the story of South Asian cab drivers in New York City, a fast-paced film shot through the prism of a cab window. At another, it is a tale of how we see each other, divided by class, age and world view within the South Asian community, and how we view the other brown-skinned people around us.

"As I start to shoot, I want to, believe we are connected," says Bald, 29, the son of an Indian mother and an Australian father. "I won't admit that while my mother and Ahmed [a cabdriver from Lahore] share a birthplace, Ahmed and I might not share anything at all, or that my few words of Urdu, spoken here in New York, don't suddenly make us a part of the same community."

Indeed, the divide between the man in the driver's seat and the camera-vala in back is thicker than the plexiglass between them. Bald belongs to the generation of South Asians raised in this country by now middle -class immigrant parents who set themselves apart from the largely working-class immigrants who have arrived later.

The cab drivers, in turn, set themselves apart from the blacks and Latinos around them. The film is blunt about their bigotry - their refusal to go to certain neighborhoods or pick up certain passengers. Nonetheless, it becomes clear that, as new as they may be to America's social codes, they are hip to whom America cherishes and whom it demonizes.

In the end, Taxi-vala is a refreshing take on identity politics in the South Asian diaspora in that it looks at how we tangle with each other, both inside and outside the so-called "community" and what that means for our place in this country. For anyone interested in this question, Taxi-vala, now making its rounds on the festival circuit, is a must-see.

-- Somini Sengupta