Hasan Minhaj on Collegiate Bollywood Dancing, Mindy Kaling, Cultural Identity and 'Best of the Best'

Hasan Minhaj joins us to talk about his new Netflix movie 'Best of the Best,' a college comedy set in the fiercely competitive world of Bollywood fusion dance. He gets into why this was basically Greek life for the South Asian diaspora, writing the movie during lockdown with Prashanth Venkataramanujam and pulling from some painfully true stories from his own life — including bidding hundreds of dollars he didn’t have on his future wife Beena at a UC Davis date auction. We also talk the star power of Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, the “Mindy Kaling effect,” A.R. Rahman, the Koh-i-Noor diamond, and why it’s taken so long to make a film like this one.

Hasan also talks about being more present, making time away from his kids count and why he wants his work to entertain while still saying something. We get into finding love, laughter, and joy in a divided world, appreciation versus appropriation, his 2017 White House Correspondents’ Dinner and why “action is the antidote to anxiety.” Plus: does hard work actually equal success? Zillow stalking, his fedora phase, Zach’s eight dogs, and Hasan’s problem with dog people.

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