He is no confused desi. Filmmaker Varun Khanna, who has recently won awards for his film American Blend at the Riverside International Film Festival in California, US, insists that his movies don’t belong to the ‘crossover’ genre.

“Call American Blend an Enid Blyton film if you will,” says Khanna. “Certainly it deals with some adult aspects. But the love and compassion is almost unreal in the film. Blyton had an incredible impact on me. I believed in pixies and goblins. I honestly thought that the best sandwiches were made on toadstools.”

After being screened at the International Film Festival in Mumbai (MAMI), the film has been showcased at the Osian Film Festival in Delhi where it has had its fair share of accolades.

Produced by White Stripes Entertainment and starring Anupam Kher, Dee Wallace Stone (who played Drew Barrymore’s mother in Spielberg’s ET), David Oyelowo, Kristin Erickson, Ruben Garfias and Ranjit Chowdhary (of Khoobsurat fame), American Blend is a family film. The 100-minute film is about Raj Chaddha (Anupam Kher), an Indian immigrant living in Los Angeles with his family. He is passionate about two things in life ? food and music, which come together in Bollywood Caf?, a restaurant he owns.

The film has some interesting touches. For instance, a jugalbandi of tap dance and kathak, which Khanna says stems from his graduate school days, when he wanted to make a film with a sequence that combined the two dance forms. “The jugalbandi is set to hip-hop and classical Indian music. The West likes to think that they created tap. But according to me, the tap dance was truly invented in India with kathak,” says Khanna.

The Los Angeles-based director-writer made his debut with the film, Beyond Honor at the MAMI festival in 2004, which released later this year in the US. He was writing the script for the film at a time of personal turmoil ? his sister was dying of breast cancer. “The film reflects the despair and hopelessness she felt in her life. It deals with the issue of female genital mutilation of young Arab-American women,” says Khanna.

And from it came forth his second film, American Blend, which is looking at an India-wide release. He says, “It was a natural progress. A month after my sister passed away, I felt this desire to find meaning in my life. I wanted to find compassion, forgiveness and celebration. I wanted to find good people around me, people who had the capacity to celebrate. And I came up with American Blend ? a true blend of music, food, dance and different nationalities such as Indians, Pakistanis, British, Hispanics and Afro-Americans.”

Says the 40-year-old director, “So you will walk out saying, there is wrong in the world and there is bad in the world, but the power within me to forgive empowers me.”

While he finds his stories in people, Khanna professes to a deep fear and paranoia almost of being influenced by somebody else’s story. “So I read up a lot of stuff on the Internet. For instance, I just read about breast ironing in Cameroon where mothers use hot irons to flatten the breasts of their young daughters. So that they can’t be seduced. When you hear that, you think what kind of a mindset would make them do that,” he comments.

Khanna was dubbed the youngest professional stage director in India when he started his directing career at the age of 17 years with the critically-acclaimed production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus. The director says that he even started acting young, at the age of five, in school. “I grew up learning a lot about acting at the Jamnabai acting school in Mumbai and then at Prithvi. My first play was with Neena Gupta, when I was about 11 years old. But yes, I have always been focused on one thing ? filmmaking,” he reminisces. In the meantime, he was also singing on All India Radio.

At home, Khanna’s father was a “tad bit uncomfortable” with his choice of professions. Anyway, Khanna completed his bachelors in physics from St Xavier’s College, Mumbai. Soon he left for the US where he did his MA in scenic design from the University of Akron and became a Phi Kappa Phi graduate from the Ohio State University with an MFA in directing and acting.

Upon graduation, he worked with nationally- recognised theatre companies in the Midwest. And in 1992, he was chosen as one of three upcoming directors in the US during a national search for theatre talent. Four years on though, he was in California, writing, editing and anchoring television news.

“For several years I got to experience what it was like on the other side of the fence. I interviewed everyone from Congressmen and Senators to Indian politicians like Rajesh Pilot, K L Sharma, L K Advani,” says Khanna who is about to start shooting for his third film in Mumbai in a few months.

He promises that his next venture, a Hindi film, is not going to be from the perspective of a non-resident Indian, but that of an individual who has grown up in the city. “It is about crime, corruption, murder and terror, not in the 9/11 sense though. In the Indian context, terror exists on an everyday basis. A terror that has permeated down because of the custom of jee huzoori, which we have been used to for ages,” he explains.

For now, all he looks forward to is a September- October release for American Blend in India. “Because I know that people will relate to it. Beyond Honor was banned by the Information & Broadcasting Ministry after it was screened at the MAMI festival. I really pray that American Blend does not go through any such hiccups."

Photograph by Rupinder Sharma