DeSiCiTi

My friend Jon Joffe directed a TV series pilot and it got screened at GlobalFest Friday night. The show was "DeSiCiTi", the story of four women and their dating exploits in NYC. Sounds familiar? The twist is, these women are desi. I had to ask Jon after the screening what that meant. Desi are the South Asian diaspora. Indo-Americans. So these women had some old-world traditions to deal with in carrying out their new-world sexploits.

The character stereotypes were all there: the ambitious, cynical lawyer (who gets passed over at work for a blonde woman); the naive good girl (who carefully puts her headscarf back on each evening when returning home to her parents); the somewhat older, sexually adventurous woman; and the girl next door (who wears a fake moustache on dates to weed out the men who don't look for deeper beauty).

My favourite part was when the older woman goes on a blind date with a Sikh man at the insistence of her parents. The man turns out to be very young, serious and intensely sexy in his black turban. They hit it off and end up going back to her place. When she starts to put the moves on, the man gets up to leave. "I want to get married," he explain. "To a woman with good morals!" The woman is taken aback but is quick-witted. "It was a test. To see if you had good morals. You passed!" They end up playing Scrabble all night.

DeSiCiTi's producers are shopping it around right now, trying to get it picked up for broadcast so that they can make it into a full-fledged TV series. I hope they do it soon. I want to see what happens next.