This week, we're revisiting the 2009 film "Karma Calling" by Sarba Das. It's a rom-com between a young Indian American woman Sonal Raj (Bernali Das) in Hoboken, New Jersey and an Indian man Rohit Rao (Samrat Chakrabarti) who works at a call center in Mumbai but is pretending to be an American named Rob Roy from Connecticut.
For this semester, which is about "Stars of Asian American Cinema," we are really leaning into our nostalgia and fondness for the actors who were everywhere in the 2000s and 2010s Asian American film festival scene. Maybe they weren't always the leads in Hollywood films, but they looked like stars, carried themselves like stars and could nail the grand onscreen romantic gesture like stars.
Samrat Chakrabarti was like this, and "Karma Calling" also features early performances from other fan favorites including Parvesh Cheena, Poorna Jagannathan, Manish Dayal, Rizwan Manji and more.
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