
And the closing film for the 2015 Boston Asian American Film Festival is Miss India America, which is on a considerably different note from Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi and The Killing Fields of Dr. Haing S. Ngor.
Miss India America tells the tale of exactly the bitch just about every high achieving Asian American student hated in high school, Lily Prasad (Tiya Sarcar), a newly-graduated valedictorian who is ready to go to Harvard, become a brain surgeon, and marry her boyfriend Karim (Kunal Sharma). After a disagreement over what he wants to do with himself, Karim breaks up with Lily and starts dating the winner of the national Indian-American beauty contest. Unused to being anything but first in anything, Lily enlists the help of her friend Seema (Kosha Patel) and decides to enter the contest herself in the hopes of winning Karim’s heart back.
As an alumnus of JP Stevens High School in Edison, New Jersey, I’m all too familiar with the archetype Lily represented. JP Stevens is a severely overcrowded dump which was fortunate enough to wind up with a large population of high-achieving college-obsessed Asian-Americans who made the school look good by increasing the percentage of the student body to get accepted to Ivy League schools. Relative proximity to New York brings good things even to those that don’t really deserve it.
Some people, like Amy Chua, celebrate the archetypical Tiger Mom by basically saying, “Am I squashing...READ FULL ARTICLE