I have been in the USA for nearly 3 years now without a trip back home to India. For a long time nearly a year (before I came to the Bay Area) I had zero contact with any things Indian. Did not eat Indian food or watch Hindi movies nor listened to Hindi music. Here I am back with my friends from High School days and I get nearly all the Indian culture I can handle. Most of the time i wonder if India really changed so much in the 3 years that I was not there. A friend talks about a no strings affair he had when he was in India for an internhsip, other friends tell me about their Indian girl friends sleeping around. And then finally I watched this movie “Mixed Doubles”. I have not seen a bolder Indian movie.

The movie starts with a marketing executive Sunil loosing his libido and unable to satify his wife Malti (Konkona Sen Sharma ). He meets his US based friend who looks 10 years younger and attributes it to his swinging life style. Now that is the biggest  piece of b. s. I have heard. I beleive I am fitter at 28 than I was at 24 when I left India. But that is because of the gym workouts and regular exercise as well as the high protein diet. I didn’t do no swinging. Any ways Sunil decides to adopt the swinger life style and finally finds a couple ready to wife swap.

The movie is beautifully made. There is nothing out of the world about this movie. From the cars they drive to the clothes the wear Sunil and Malti come across as the usual upwardly mobile yuppie family. Maybe that is the reason I found this movie so shocking. It is like the traditional orthodox India that I left behind no longer exists. In some weird ways I am truly uprooted. I am neither an American in the sense that I have not really adapted to the life here. At the same time the India I left behind ( in 2000 actually as I was mostly out of India after that) no longer exists. I need to find a wayout of this conundrum.