Taxi-vala/Auto-biography (dir. Vivek Renjen Bald, 1994, 48min) is an experimental documentary which explores a complex range of issues within New York's growing South Asian communities. The work takes as its point of departure the intersection between a second-generation bi-racial Indian-American (the videomaker), and a group of recent immigrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh who drive taxicabs, twelve hours a day, on New York City's streets.

Taxi-vala shuttles between the stories of these immigrant drivers and the self-critical reflections of the videomaker, combining Hi-8 video with Super-8 film, color with black and white, real time with slow motion, and straight talking-heads interviews with abstracted images of the New York cityscape. While the drivers relate experiences of migration and displacement, economic and political struggle, and their quest for the elusive and illusory American Dream, the videomaker charts his own personal quest for community with the drivers through the making of the documentary itself. In so doing he raises questions of cultural, generational, and class difference within the South Asian American communities, and explores his own silences with the drivers around issues of sexism, and inter-group racism.

Taxi-vala/Auto-biography premiered at the Whitney Museum of American Art's Fall 1994 exhibit, From India to America: New Directions in Indian American Film and Video, which travelled to Delhi and Bombay in December, 1994. It has since screened at: Visualizing South Asian Diasporas (Rice University, Houston, TX, March 1996), South Asian Students Association Annual Conference (Brown University, Providence, RI, March 1996), 24th Annual Conference on South Asia (Madison, Wisconsin, October 1995), Queens Museum of Art (Queens, New York, August 1995), The Chicago Asian American Film Festival (Honorable Mention, May 1995), Asian Cinevision's Videoscapes Festival (New York, May 1995), Desh Pardesh (Toronto, Canada, May 1995), The Asian Pacific American Conference (APAC) (Albany, New York, April 1995), The Asian American International Film and Video Showcase (San Francisco, March 1995)