I LOVE Piku!! I’ve watched that movie like 15 times lol! But yeah I agree with you about what to avoid. Karan Johar is awful. Just fucking terrible. Also avoid Salman Khan movies, not least because he’s a murderer and a woman beater. Vishal Bharadwaj is brilliant. Farhan Akhtar too.

My wife won’t ever be strutting down a New York fashion runway, but I have a strong suspicion that when she asks me this type of question it’s because she’s already aware of an issue with her appearance and unsure if others will notice or be critical. As a slightly heavyset person, I’ve only had to outright tell her…

Go do a Google search for “saintly minority character,” if you’ve got the time. You clearly do.

(And by extension, that is the feedback that I would find most useful. Don’t tell me something looks bad if there’s nothing I can do to fix it!)

“Several people throughout, including Gould, note that Apu isn’t a character that would come out of, let alone thrive in, the medium as it currently stands.”

I somehow doubt a lot of Indians are getting annoyed that when they meet people, they joke, “Haha, you must be this town’s most desirable bachelor!”

The system my fiance and I use for this is basically “is there some major flaw in my outfit I’m not seeing.”

Bro, relax. I was just relating a funny anecdote about being a sheltered suburbanite teen unaware of the stereotypes that existed in the larger world. And I never hung out in the Central Valley, it was just an area we drove through on the way to the mountains. If you’re a California native, you should know that saying…

Absolutely, just like my dad commenting about Danica Roem’s victory. I respond with “Yeah, it’s great! She should be a good fit for her state, really excited to see more people with more representation!”.

All of the things you list happen in a span of about a dozen episodes (if that) out of 624. Apu’s defining characteristics have always been his occupation and his accent, and that’s why those are the elements that have permeated into popular consciousness.

On the better question front, a more specific question is useful. Like “Do these colors look right together?” or “Is this blouse formal/summery/etc?” The problem with “Do I look ok?” is that all answers mean *you* physically don’t look ok, which probably isn’t true and isn’t going to get said even if it happens to be…

But most of that character development came much later, and it was clearly an attempt to make Apu more than just a stereotype. That’s admirable, for sure, but the fact remains that he was created specifically as a one joke character, and that joke was “Ha ha, the convenience store clerk is Indian.”

It’s probably worth mentioning all of those things if only to rightly dismiss them as “those elaborate things that happen in Simpsons episodes that don’t really matter regardless of whether they inspire occasional callbacks ten or fifteen seasons later.”

As a member of Gen X, I grew up uncritically loving The Simpsons, but I always did find the character of Apu kind of strange. I lived in an East Bay (that’s the San Francisco Bay Area) city with a large Indian population, and most of the Indian adults I knew were well-educated, quite a lot of them medical…

Being Indian myself, I feel like South Asians are the most misrepresented community in Hollywood. I mean there is progress, but it’s so minimal. That’s why I related so much to Master of None. Aziz Ansari makes a big effort to bring about the real representation. And frankly it’s not even that hard. Watch any South…

“this new dialogue in america upsets my way of life and thinking, i better get drunk and rant on facebook”

Actually made me laugh out loud. So I thought I’d let you know.

“I believe it is time to speak up on behalf of all heterosexual males”.

...

Lord knows that when I look back on all the women I’ve loved, I primarily think about the men they worked for.

He fucked Bob Taft in a barn? kinky....