FLYING SOLO

For three decades, Aasif Mandvi, the British-American actor-creator of Indian origin, has worked hard to mainstream the immigrant experience in Hollywood and theatre. He’s played the skeptic, the cynic, the empiricist, the debunker, the myth-buster. Now, as he learns his way around fatherhood, and returns to an ever-more woke workplace, Mandvi takes stock of the world as it was, is and as he’d like for it to be

- NIDHI GUPTA

“Do you have cornflakes in India?” Aasif Mandvi leans back into his swivel chair, adjusts his grey beanie. Unsure if this is a trick question, I mumble that it’s a common breakfast item. Of course, he chuckles; the last time he visited India in 2017 to meet family in Mumbai, he was fed plenty of idli and dosas, but there were no bowls of cornflakes forthcoming, so you can understand the confusion. Still, “that may be the most American thing I’ve ever said,” he grins sheepishly.

It may well have been a metaphorical question, since Mandvi had just deployed cornflakes to explain his theory of what equal representation in entertainment looks like, when done right from the storyteller’s point of view. “You have to lean into the specifics to access the general,” he says. “But you can’t do that by making everything palatable for everyone. If you try to please too many people, you’ll end up with something benign – like cornflakes. Everybody likes cornflakes, but nobody ever talks about cornflakes.”

“As an artist, you don’t want your work to be cornflakes, you want it to be… Something that resonates with people on a deeper level; you want it to affect people, to move them, to make them laugh, cry, whatever. And those things only happen by taking your specificity and putting it out in the world. That’s a brave thing to do, but it’s also the only thing you can do.”