Aasif Mandvi

A series of autobiographical essays about Aasif Mandvi's life- his family, growing up in both Great Britain and Tampa, Florida, pursuing acting, etc.

I liked it ok, 3.5 rounded up to 4.

This was published in 2014, so it was a little jarring to see a brief cameo by Harvey Weinstein in the essay on Aasif's experience with Ismail Merchant for the making of The Mystic Masseur. No mention of the work on the live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender movie, which is also just as well since that movie's probably better left forgotten...… (mehr)

Summer 2019 - Audible original (May);

I knew the moment I skimmed the synopsis this piece would be for me. You can take the girl out her master dissertation of Jhumpa Lahiri, but you cannot take the things she learned to love and mourn there out of the girl.

This is another gorgeous declaration of the slings and arrows of diasporic hybrid identities of multiple generations trying to understand the world they've traveled to, and, also, the new world they've been born to, while straddling both the old world, the mixed world of their parents, and the native not-new land where they've grown up. I have such love already for these topics, and so I cried with the mother, felt the despair of the father, the burgeoning hope of the newly relocated, the betrayal of the current generation both in going back and in being present.

I advise this to anyone who understands how clearly the divides between generations of immigrants (and emigrants) can affect everything about a life, a person, a family, a country, culture, connection, and on and on. I still have a quiet, melancholy in my soul for this piece that will be there a while longer. It was superbly done.
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