Replaced films and cancelled screenings characterised the South Asian International Film Festival

Aseem Chhabra

It was a week of high and low culture for the Indian American community in New York City. And the week showed that when the city's community rises, how much it can be admired, but when we fall, the hole is a deep, dark, bottomless pit.

Earlier this week, nearly 250 people gathered for the US launch of Madhur Jaffrey's autobiography, Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India. The event was hosted by the Indo-American Arts Council at Manhattan's Tamarind Art Gallery.

It was one of the best-attended South Asian book launches in the city. Jaffrey's film and writing career brought many celebrities to the event such as actors Wallace Shawn and Sarita Choudhury, model Padma Lakshmi, and authors Suketu Mehta and Pankaj Mishra. And a lot of people were overjoyed by Kiran Desai being awarded the Man Booker Prize for her novel The Inheritance of Loss.

Desai lives in the Brooklyn borough of NYC ' home to a variety of literary celebrities, including Suketu Mehta, Jhumpa Lahiri and Amitav Ghosh. Had she not been shortlisted for the Booker, Desai would have perhaps turned up for Jaffrey's reading. There are family connections here. Jaffrey thanks Desai's mother, Anita, in her book. And Desai is friends with Jaffrey's daughter Zia.

The celebration went on for quite some time after Jaffrey's book reading. People were heard commenting that they could not believe that Desai had won the prize. It was like Desai's honour was a win for the whole collective group.

A few days earlier, a very different form of the Indian American community gathered in Queens to mark the annual Diwali Mela, organised by the Jackson Heights Merchants' Association. It was a more boisterous group. Queens is home to the largest base of the South Asian community in NYC ' more working class or middle class as compared to those who live in Manhattan.

The mela was less about Diwali and more about loud blaring music ' mostly latest Bollywood songs blasted from giant speakers that were set up along several booths along 74th Street, selling DVDs and CDs of Hindi films.

But the Diwali Mela was not the real low point for the Indian community. Last week, filmmaker Tanuja Chandra travelled to New York for the world premiere of her new work ' Hope and a Little Sugar, a post 9/11 film shot in English in the city. The event marked the opening of the third South Asian International Film Festival (SAIFF). In fact, Chandra had high hopes for this screening. That would explain why she was not in India promoting her poorly-received Hindi film Zindaggi Rocks.

The show was supposed to start at 8.30 pm, and an hour earlier, the lobby of the AMC/ Loews Lincoln Square was packed. The show was delayed. People waited patiently in the lobby of the multiplex. An hour later, the organisers announced that there were some technical difficulties with the screening. Finally by 10 pm, the show was cancelled.

And the embarrassment for SAIFF's organisers did not end here. Manish Jha's new film Anwar was scheduled to open the festival. But a week before, the organisers announced that Anwar was not ready to be shown and would be replaced by Hope and a Little Sugar.

The next day, the organisers announced that they had been unable to get a print of the Bengali film Anuranan, starring Rahul Bose. At the last minute it was replaced with Omkara.

While they were able to reschedule the screening of Chandra's film, the festival had one more surprise for the audiences. Two days into the event, the organisers also announced they were cancelling the previously announced closing night film ' Jaan-e-Mann.

'The festival was a shame for the desi community,' said a prominent Indian American and New Yorker later, adding that the organisers were over-ambitious in their plans and so they fell short on their delivery.

' Aseem Chhabra is a freelance writer based in New York who has previously written for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer and Time Out, New York