‘Loins of Punjab’ tickles New York’s funny bone

NEW YORK: Well known Indian playwright and screen writer Anuvab Pal’s “Loins of Punjab Presents” is bringing laughs to the US film festival circuit. The film written by Pal and directed by Manish Acharya, a former executive at software maker MicroStrategy, stars Shabana Azmi and Ayesha Dharker.

“It is about a meat distribution company in New Jersey that decides to sponsor a Bollywood singing contest in Edison. It is shot like a documentary where we follow seven contestants doing their best to win this contest,” said Pal, who has created zany characters for the film including a gay Sikh Bhangra rapper and a wannabe Bollywood actress who doesn’t speak a word of Hindi. Azmi is a screen stealer as a practiced social climber who is pure evil. The Loins of Punjab just swept the Best Film Award at the 2007 First Run Festival in New York and is headed later this year to the London Film Festival.

“I may be beaten up for saying it, but there is this notion that immigrant stories have to be very serious. The conversation can’t be very witty, intelligent or funny. I have been in many environments where Indians say very funny things which have great comic dramatic potential. I think we as a community are very funny,’ said Oxford-educated Pal, who flits between homes in New York and Mumbai.

The 31-year-old Indian playwright is currently working on the script of I’m Not Bajirao but has another interesting project up his sleeve. “The producers and creators of Goodness Garcious Me, Sanjeev Bhaskar et al were down in India developing a pilot for a British TV show, a comedy set in a call centre in Mumbai, when they came to see my play The President is Coming and I was asked to come and join the team as one of the writers for the pilot.”

Pal will be joining the team of writers in England if the show does get picked up by ITV. British actor and comedian Sanjeev Bhaskar who has prompted an explosion in cross-cultural comedy will star in the drama as a mediocre accountant sent to India to save a failing call centre.

Pal first tasted success in the US with his very first play Chaos Theory which gives a gleeful twist to the immigrant story. And, audiences, it seems, can’t get enough of this Woody Allen-style cerebral play which will be performed once again off-Broadway in fall this year.

“People have really liked Chaos Theory and it has lingered on. It has had 112 performances in the US. And, now Rita Wolf is planning to resurrect Chaos Theory in September at Manhattan’s Acorn Theatre,” Pal said.

Pal’s Chaos Theory starring Asif Mandvi and Rita Wolf as two English professors ensconced in American universities touches on the theme of unrequited love without being maudlin.

“There are these two kinds of survival. There are immigrant stories about basic survival. And, then you have these stories about the survival of ideas,” pointed out Pal.

“It may be cinematically potent to have a guy running away from a bunch of US border patrolmen, but I am more fascinated by the very educated and sort of dislocated Indian academics and intellectuals in New York. They brought what they knew of their culture into this new melting pot.”