Why "India Outside India"?

Since I came to NYC I have been trying to capture for the benefit of my international friends what is ‘India’ or ‘Indianness’. We have discussed various facets of Indian people, culture, ways of meaning making and what it means to live as an Indian. It was also interesting when my international friends shared what they thought being Indian was/must be like for me. I have been capturing visuals that I thought express non-Indians’ perceptions about India and also the expressions/visuals shared by the Indian community in US that must be shaping this perception. After a year of gathering images and talking in my head about it I thought why not put it all down in a blog.

Friday, March 27, 2009

Indian in US TV series

CSI – NY’s latest episode showed the festival of colors – holi being celebrated somewhere in Queens. I captured a couple of stills. As you can see the girls dancing are wearing a belly dancing costume. Is that a CSI version of Indian? CSI now-a-days is overly dramatizing scenes towards phony anyways.















Here is another one from the same scene. My first reaction was that this is another example of the 'exotic east' syndrome. But then again this might be the expression of Indian by the community in queens that I am discarding as not authentic enough. Me being the 'real' Indian and all. ;)

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