I Pitched My New Sitcom Idea to NBC, But They Said It Didn't Have Enough Ethnic Flair

Consider a new show, "Life with the Chatterjees."

Cast of Characters:

A White Boy named something really simple, but totally unpronounceable in Bengali--like "Sam" which comes out "Shem," which is coincidentally one of Krishna's names. Sam can't decide if he likes this or not.

Sam is spending the summer in Kolkata, paying the equivalent of $200 for room, home-cooked meals, and personal laundry service. He is living with a Bengali family comprised of...

Mr. Chatterjee.
Mr. Chatterjee welcomes Sam with an air of refined bumblingness. For the first week, when his wife is away in Momboi visiting their middle daughter, Mr. Chatterjee complains, in a tone that is at once serious and self-deprecating, that his wife better come home soon, or the house will fall to pieces. Despite his assertions to the contrary, Mr. Chatterjee is a pretty good cook, and offers Sam far more food than their official agreement calls for.

Mr. Chatterjee, a very wealthy businessman, now runs an export firm, which requires very little of his time. With all his free days, Mr. Chatterjee takes morning walks, visits his elite country club to golf and get served extremely expensive tea, and visit his village. His family has owned an estate in this village, about 2 hours from the city, for 3 generations. When Mr. Chatterjee says that he "loves village life" and Sam asks him what he means, Mr. Chatterjee replies that he loves going for walks in the forest, stopping in with his private assistant, and eating food cooked by their chef.


Mr. Chatterjee, a very friendly fellow, does very little socializing, because he says, "Friends will come if you give them food, but not otherwise. Sometimes I go out to cocktail parties, that sort of thing, but usually I stay home. I say, the less socializing the better, yes?" He pauses, long enough to make Sam think he should respond, and then utters a high pitched laugh. He does this kind of thing often.

Mr and Mrs Chatterjee have 3 daughters, the youngest of which lives in the house. Her name is...

Sharana. She is a very nice person who works at a multinational out in Salt Lake, where they give her complimentary French classes (although, she complains, she has to make up for her work by staying late). Her father says that she is fat while referring to his oldest daughter, who lives in Philadelphia.

"My oldest daughter," he says, "She use do be so fat, twice the size of her!" He makes a vague gesture over towards Sharana's room.

Sharana holds the opinion, typical (as far as I can tell) of the Anglo-Indian corporate class, that quotas for poor students in major universities are a bad idea because it will hurt India's chances at becoming a superpower. When pushed, she agrees that some measures to ensure social equality need to be taken, but at the primary school level.

Sam notices, one day in the The Telegraph, that the national government has been considering repealing quotas at the primary level as well.

While Mrs. Chatterjee is away, Sam is cared for by...

The Maid
Mr. Chatterjee's case that he has no idea how to run the house without Mrs. Chatterjee is more compelling by his inability to tell the maid what to do. She is very friendly, and wakes Sam up to give him tea that he doesn't know how to say he doesn't want, because his Bengali is very poor. Sam doesn't really understand their methods; for the first week, she changed his sheets twice every day, regardless of whether or not Sam has slept in the bed since last the sheets were changed. Then, she leaves the same burlap-textured thing on the bed for 3 days. Sam cannot tell if its cultural difference or vindictiveness for something Sam didn't know he did.

Mr. Chatterjee, ever the aristocrat, once says about the maid, while Sam is eating breakfast. "I can't get her to do anything right! I have to tell her a hundred times." Then, he remarks, contemplatively, "But you know, if she had a high IQ, would she be working as a maidservant? No! She'd be working as a minister. Yes?" Mr. Chatterjee delivers a magnificent performance of one of those awkward pauses I was telling you about, and then, predictably, laughs, and bumbles into his room.

Finally, the triumphant return of


Mrs. Chatterjee

She is a kind, strong woman, who is both relaxed and accommodating. She and Sam work out a system by which she makes him dinner most nights for something like a dollar a meal. It turns out she used to run a catering agency, and it shows.

Her daughter tells me, kind of regretfully, that her mother is not actually a Bengali--she's from the Punjab--but, she hastens to add, that her mother can cook Bengali food as well as any Bengali, so I had no need to worry.

Believe you me: I didn't.

So there's the cast of characters. You can only imagine what wacky adventures those folks are having! And way over there in West Bengal, too!