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Titled "From India to America: New Directions in Indian American Film and Video", the film series showed September 21 through October 16 in New York.

The series' curator, L. Somi Roy, developed the program as a part of the Whitney Museum's focus on American film. While some of the scheduled works look at subjects such as Trinidadian singer Calypso Rose and San Francisco sex workers, many of the films and videos attempt to wrestle with the filmmakers' Indian heritage. The heterogeneity of pieces and perspective make it difficult to posit any particularly Indian American aesthetic; one of the few common threads is the shifting distances between the reality of India and the India in these works.

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Vivek Renjen Bald -- who, like Erica Surat Anderson and Michelle Taghioff, is also of mixed heritage -- may mispronounce "Ahmad," but his awareness of the problematics of positioning himself as a source of knowledge on "Indianness" makes his video on South Asian taxi drivers one of the best works in the Whitney series.

The humor and humanity of Taxi-vala, often reminiscent of Gurinder Chadha's wonderful video Acting Our Age on Punjabi seniors in a British community center, lies in Bald s willingness to let his subjects speak. The South Asian cab drivers spout everything from sexist ideas about a woman's place to questions about the rich and poorly dressed punks they ferry around the East Village. Bald the bohemian Indian American auteur tries to explain where the punks get their money from and what their lifestyle is all about: a beautiful moment of interaction between the America Bald lives in and the South Asian culture he is reaching out to.

(Reprinted from India Currents Magazine, November 1994)