I’m a huge fan of both Black Mirror and Severance. What stayed with me after watching them, however, wasn’t the world or the plot, but the feeling - that creeping helplessness that made me quietly rethink my own life. That emotional aftertaste was something I wanted Jam Boy to leave with audiences too. But where I think it diverges is this: Those shows are often about technology going wrong or going too far, whereas Jam Boy is about technology working exactly as designed. No glitch. No villain twirling a mustache. Just a system doing what it was built to do - optimise, categorise, reward compliance. That, to me, is even more chilling.

In that sense, it’s tonally closer to Get Out than pure sci-fi. The horror isn’t loud - it’s polite. It smiles at you. The model minority story is like that too. There isn’t always a visible oppressor. The pressure is often internalised. Jam Boy asks: What parts of ourselves do we quietly erase in order to be the ‘perfect’ immigrant - and what happens when we wake up and realise we don’t know who’s left?

When I first started brainstorming story ideas, people would suggest the obvious immigration crisis: losing a visa and being forced to leave the US. But that didn’t feel like the deepest fear to me. India today is a rising economy - many people can rebuild, even if it meant starting over. Painful, yes. But survivable. What truly unsettled me were the quieter stories I kept hearing - friends and family who hesitated to fly back home because of visa risks, job pressure, or the fear of falling behind at work. And then there’s the more haunting version: people who get so absorbed into the cycle of promotions, performance reviews, and proving themselves that they don’t realise, until much later, that the idea of ‘home’ has quietly slipped out of reach or worse, doesn’t exist anymore.

We talk a lot about the struggle to get in. I wanted to explore the terror of not being able to get out. That felt urgent, and strangely underrepresented. There’s an image from the Mahabharata that stayed with me - Abhimanyu knew how to enter the Chakravyuh battle formation but not how to exit it. I see a parallel in the rat race many high-achieving immigrants enter with confidence, only to find themselves trapped inside systems they helped power. In that sense, Jam Boy connects the past and present. Colonial ‘jam boys’ were used to attract insects away from British officers. Today, we risk becoming ‘digital jam boys’ - valuable, high-performing, indispensable… but still expendable. The form of control has changed, yet the psychology of entrapment hasn’t.

I do see them as connected, but they operate on different emotional frequencies. Stories about raids and detention camps show the violence of exclusion. The state is saying you do not belong here, and that violence is visible, loud, and extreme. Jam Boy spotlights a quieter form of control, which is conditional belonging. The system says you can stay, as long as you remain useful, compliant, and grateful. There are no sirens or fences, just permissions that can be withdrawn. That contrast is important to me because both stories are really about control, just expressed through different management strategies. One is spectacle and confrontation, while the other is subtle erosion. I was drawn to the second because it feels closer to how power often operates in everyday immigrant life for the model minority.

This connects deeply to what Vijay Prashad writes about in The Karma of Brown Folk. He describes how people of colour are divided and weaponised against each other – one is designated to be the ‘problem’, and the other, the model minority, the ‘solution’. That praise becomes a form of control. While one community is criminalised and pushed out, the other is instrumentalised and kept in. One group is treated as a threat and the other as a tool.

As with most things today, we tend to focus most on what is visible than what is insidious. That psychological uncertainty can shape a life just as profoundly as physical confinement. I was drawn to that internalised version because it is easier to normalise and harder to see. People living inside it often mistake control for opportunity, like I once did in my own case. That ambiguity, to me, felt deeply cinematic and very present in the lives of many immigrants today.

For me, acting and directing at the same time is less about multitasking and more about switching states of mind with intention. Directing is about perspective and generosity. Acting is about presence. The key is knowing when to let one lead and when to quiet the other. As a director, you are constantly holding a larger vision while embracing other people’s ideas, performances, and instincts. You are juggling interpretations that might differ from your own and then shaping them into a coherent emotional throughline. That requires openness and decisiveness at the same time. As an actor, you have to let go of that big-picture control and stay inside the moment. You cannot be judging the scene from the outside while trying to live truthfully inside it.

That balance only worked because of preparation and trust. I surrounded myself with an incredibly strong core team and we did deep pre-production, mapping out shots, priorities, and contingencies in detail. That groundwork meant I didn’t have to carry the whole film in my head on set. I could be emotionally available in front of the camera. As an actor, I made a rule for myself not to chase perfection but to chase truth. If I felt something real land in my body, I moved on. That discipline protected the performance from overthinking. Having a competent and dedicated continuity team – script supervisor, costume head, and hair and makeup professional saved the day on many an occasion, and I consider that one of the most pleasant realisations I’ve had on this set. Advance planning and visualisation helped ensure that acting and directing never felt like juggling two jobs. It felt like designing the conditions where both could exist without competing.

One experience that unexpectedly prepared me for Jam Boy was playing Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol across multiple stage runs over two years. I imagined him as a South Asian man in Victorian London, someone who survives through restraint and quiet endurance as he tries to assimilate. That was my first deep exploration of a character whose strength comes from containment rather than action.

On stage, especially in a two thousand seat theatre, you cannot play that kind of role by shrinking. I had to learn how to quiet everything else so the smallest internal shift could carry meaning. But the emotional key for Jam Boy came from my own time in corporate America. I began to recognise how much of the pressure I felt was not always imposed directly but internalised. I was constantly self-editing, staying agreeable, proving useful, and I brought that truth with me to the Jam Boy role. His lack of agency is not just systemic, it is psychological. He participates in the system even as it traps him, he is complicit. Living inside that pressure, rather than fighting it outwardly, became the emotional spine of the role.

I love the romance of flying to Madurai for parotta, but I have been on a different journey, trying to recreate home in my own kitchen. During the COVID period, I made it a project to learn my mom’s recipes over video calls. It turned into hours of laughter, trial and error, and family stories I might never have heard otherwise. Now, I feel like I can bring home to me wherever I am and share it with others around me. The food moments in Jam Boy come directly from that experience.

I do not just crave my own cuisine but love traditional home cooking from everywhere. What moves me the most is the unmistakable sparkle in someone’s eyes when they share a recipe tied to their family history. That act of sharing is a deeply human experience that transcends borders. The line in Jam Boy where my mom reminds me of the first time I tried cooking is completely true. I once held up a gourd on a video call and asked her how to cut it. Since then I have navigated smoke alarms, improvised ingredients, and the journey from her “ujjaayimpugaa veyyi,” meaning add by instinct in Telugu, to my carefully measured portions that are slowly becoming instincts of their own.

In the film, those food moments are not just nostalgia. They are about connection, memory, and the quiet ways we carry home within us, if we allow and make space for it.

This moment forces us to ask what we really value about cinema, not just as a business but as a shared cultural experience. Watching a film in a theatre isn’t only about distribution. It is about being in a room with strangers, reacting together, holding silence together, and then stepping out to discuss and debate what you just saw. That collective processing is where a film’s life really begins, and I have more faith than fear in the belief that we will preserve this aspect of the theatrical business.

That is one of the main reasons I submitted Jam Boy to the DC Independent Film Festival. I value their film forum, the discussions, and the sense of community around the screenings. I believe those shared conversations will shape Jam Boy’s voice and my identity as a filmmaker far more than pure numbers of views ever could. I also find myself less drawn to extreme predictions about the future of cinema. Historically, whenever we’ve swung too far in one direction, another force pulls us back toward balance. We are already seeing people feel fatigued by constant digital immersion, with social media detoxing becoming more common. I think the same impulse might apply here. Sometimes, we only realise the value of something when we fear its loss.

Our world premiere is at the DC Independent Film Festival (DCIFF) on February 15 2026, so I’m really looking forward to experiencing that first live audience response. But even in early private screenings and conversations, a few reactions have really stayed with me. One that meant a lot was from Deirdre Evans-Pritchard, DCIFF’s executive director, who described the film as being made with ‘warmth.’ That word stayed with me. Jam Boy deals with systems and pressure, but I was never interested in blaming one group or pointing fingers. In such a polarised moment, the choice of that word felt like recognition that the film leads with empathy rather than accusation. It made me feel DCIFF is the right space to amplify Jam Boy’s voice with the nuance and humanity it was made with.

Friends in India who watched a draft of the film added another dimension to the response. They said the story did not just feel like it was about immigrants in the United States, but about millions of tech workers in South Asia who are caught in relentless cycles of performance and late nights while serving distant time zones. For them, the film spoke to the feeling of being physically home yet mentally elsewhere, which made the idea of digital ‘jam boys’ and a kind of colonisation of the mind feel especially urgent and resonant.

A few viewers also mentioned how unsettling it felt that a system could decide when and how you are allowed to see your parents. That detail hit people on a very intimate and human level about how much of our lives we quietly hand over to institutions without realizing the cost.

Jam Boy is my attempt to add a new dimension to South Asia–centric storytelling - one that looks inward at the psychological and emotional costs of modern success.

What has encouraged me most is that people are responding to the film around the themes I hoped to explore, especially the ‘model minority pressure’ to be endlessly grateful, high-performing, and compliant.

Interestingly, a very early feature version of Jam Boy was set in a world where AI-generated content has proliferated and become ubiquitous. In that landscape, live human experiences like real food, real touch, and real performance become the most premium and coveted things. The more synthetic an environment gets, the more valuable the unfiltered human moment becomes. That tension between automation and authenticity is something I think we are already beginning to live through.

I find AI fascinating as a tool that can help with workflows, accessibility, and brainstorming. As the founder of IndianRaga, I’ve seen waves of new creative technologies come and go from editing tools to social platforms to performance tech. There’s usually an initial phase of excitement and overuse, where the novelty drives everything. But over time, things tend to settle back toward core human instincts. Audiences and artists alike start asking not just what is possible but what feels meaningful.

Cinema, or for that matter any powerful story, has always been about human interpretation. It is about contradiction, vulnerability, and lived experience. An AI system can replicate patterns from existing performances, but it cannot, yet, truly originate from a body that has lived, loved, lost, and struggled. That difference may be invisible at a glance, but audiences feel it over time.

The idea of an AI actor is a perfect example of both the promise and the risk. Technology can simulate presence, but it cannot carry memory in the way a human performer does. For me, the key question is not whether AI will be used in cinema. It already is. The real question is whether and when we build systems that protect human artists, ensure consent, and protect their continuity in the ecosystem of human creativity.

In a way, this connects thematically to Jam Boy. The film is about what happens when systems start to optimise people, to measure their value solely in terms of output and utility.

AI can be an incredible collaborator, but if we are not careful, we risk applying the same logic to artists too.