At times reviled, at times envied back home, and barely accepted in their adopted homelands, the NRIs are making themselves seen and heard on international screens. A report by Shubhra Gupta

Mohan Agashe and Anju Mahendroo star in A Pocketful of Dreams.

A new Indian emerged at the 31st International Film Festival of India that closed last week: this is an Indian who has been a slight, defused presences in the movies till now, or has been caricatured mercilessly. In the only innovative section of the fest, 'India and International Screen', this hybrid creature, a product of two cultures was to be found in a series of postures trying to find itself.

The Non-Resident Indian has been viewed from the outside for a long time in two modes, mainly. In the first instance, he is the object of deep envy: he earns in top dollar (an NRI who earns in lesser currency, such as the deutsche mark, is not worthy of the acronym), he drives a BMW or a Mercedes, and keeps the nifty sports models for racy weekends, has a deep-freeze which stocks frozen caviar, and gets all this either in sunny California, or in the chillier environs of Wall Street, where an hours consult is worth 500 USD.

Or, she is the butt of never-ending jokes. Gujju Bens who insist on frying their bhajiyas in the suburbs of New Jersey, despite vigilant alarm systems, or ladies of other unspecified ethnic denominations who will insist on wearing their nylon saris and rexine bindis, in addition to their ability to pick up the difference between cents and nickels.

The in-between Indian was missing: The first generation Indian, who goes to school, college has friends, consumes American pop culture. And apple pie, and is an American as his / her date at the high school prom, and as Indian as he / she wants to be.

A Pocketful Of Dreams has many more rough edges, and in places it looks like a schoolboy's primer on What Not To Do When Immigrating, but it also shows you people who exist: a full-fledged colonel in the Indian Army and his wife, played by Mohan Agashe and Anju Mahendroo, decide to migrate in search of the American Dream. What they find, in place of the four-bedroom apartment, and the cell-phone that the colonel's younger brother claims to have, is a tiny basement room in a sleazy part of New York, from where the lights of downtown Manhattan are as far as the moon.

Colonel Om Puri has to find a job as a security officer, his wife hires out her services as a maid, and their daughter ends up getting pregnant in an unsavoury encounter with a co-ed. And the colonel's brother who is supposed to be the manager of a restaurant, but actually works in that restaurant as a cleaner, gets fired. The movie ends with the colonel and his wife returning to India, and the daughter staying back with her uncle, because they're attracted to the freedom that life in the US can bring to those people who can assimilate, and learn to find a place for themselves in a new culture.