I once had a college roommate who grew up in South Lake Tahoe but had never been skiing. ‘That’s for tourists,’ he sniffed. And the same was in my years in New York. I was proud of living in a place where you could ignore three great desi arts events every Saturday. While if you lived elsewhere, you’d make sure to be at every single event, starved of artistic sustenance.

These past few days I played tourist in my former town, churning through the same four arts events a day I was too lazy and ungrateful to get my @ss to when I lived there. They all blur together in my head, but in the next few days I’m going to pull out some highlights:

Engendered. A panel discussion with Mira Nair, Ramchand Pakistani director Mehreen Jabbar, my friend Anuvab Pal and many other filmirati. It began with Nair’s ‘Migration,’ an entertaining AIDS short linking Indian lover in a chain of bodily fluids. Vijay Raaz plays a condom crier who persuades people to don the jimmy hat with hilarious monologues in Hindi. Shiney Ahuja, who looks every bit the movie star, is not quite believable as a construction laborer who has hot, against-the-wall sex with Sameera Reddy’s wealthy, sexually frustrated housewife. (Nair said the story was based on a real incident where a baby was born with HIV, and it turned out the mother had been sleeping with the sabziwalla.) Her husband Irrfan Khan is on the down low, in love with Arjun Mathur (Luck By Chance) and avoiding his marital duties with the sultry Reddy.

The guy running the projector fumbled with angles and focus for a long while, and Nair grew snippy, perhaps used to events by more moneyed orgs. The most charming, insightful speech I’ve seen her give to date was when she received a medal at Harvard’s Memorial Church. Throaty-voiced Jabbar, who looks like the love child of Sheryl Crow and Ciarán Hinds, showed up in knee-high boots and talked about using Iranian cinematic tactics to evade censors in Pakistan. Her ‘Beauty Parlor‘ short film about characters in a salon — a hijra, a prostitute and so on — was fun but as unsubtle as Ramchand. Sitting up front, Jabbar visibly cringed every time a title screen flashed by. She had apologized in advance — ‘I was young’ — but they were merely a little emo, like a barely-there zit you fixate on.

Abhay Deol did not show up due to an illness in the family. The panel ran long, and I could see Anuvab fidgeting just as I was. My prescription: more Dev. D clips, more Anuvab-doing-funny-voices and more of gay activist Gautam Bhan, who talked about trying to translate LGBT into Hindi (it’s very long). Bhan said Indian gays were ready to battle the censor board over Brokeback Mountain. But when the only snip was seven seconds of Michelle Williams’ breasts, they decided they really didn’t care

‘Migration’ is part of a film anthology called AIDS Jaago (AIDS Awake). Here’s the trailer:

Mira Nair at Engendered

Gautam Bhan, Mehreen Jabbar

Anuvab prepares to pounce