“I am 29 years old and I live at home with my folks…Wooh hoo! I’m getting lucky every night…home cooked meals, my laundry gets washed and they’re arranging dates for me left right and centre. It doesn’t get any luckier than that!” So says Sanjay Gupta – no, not the CNN superstar – but the one who runs his parents’ corner store in New Zealand, home to about 4.4 million people – and 40 million sheep!
This Sanjay Gupta, besides selling beer and cigarettes, is also an aspiring stand up comic. You can see him in the funny one-man show ‘D’Arranged Marriage’ at the Soho Playhouse. Every young South Asian will see a bit of themselves in this character, played by Rajeev Varma, a real life stand up comic and actor, also from Auckland, New Zealand, where he says besides the 40 million sheep, there are also 100,000 Indian immigrants.
In ‘D’Arranged Marriage’ the multi-talented Varma plays nine quirky characters – including Sanjay, his dad, his mother, his uncle, his friend, a cranky old woman and even his sweetheart Neenu! For 90 frenetic minutes nonstop he hams it up, sings, jokes, has hysterics, and dances Bollywood style, without taking a breath. Since all things Indian are considered cool now, the largely western audience seemed to have a blast!
Varma, whose parents would have liked him to be a doctor like the CNN Sanjay Gupta, has had a fun career as a stand up comic instead, forming a company called Those Indian Guys with another stand up comic in New Zealand, Tarun Mohanbhai. They co-wrote ‘D’Arranged Marriage’ and ‘From India with Love’, and took their comedy sketches to Australia, Malaysia and South Africa, and everywhere they’ve struck a chord with Indian immigrants, and won local fans too.
It was at a performance in Malaysia that Varma met his American wife and moved to New York, leaving Auckland, his parents and a multitude of sheep behind. He’s done films and TV, including ‘Xena, Warrior Princess’, written a sketch for HBO.com, and is auditioning for plays and movies in New York. Now for a New Zealand lad, that’s not baa-baa-baad!
