As the editor, my portfolio included interviews and events. Following the screening of the docudrama, Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain, I was given a few minutes to interview the actor Kal Penn. While it was a tremendous privilege and quite entertaining, I only had a few minutes to chat. I had to make the most of it to meet the brief and word count. To address that, I took an unconventional approach to re-introduce him to the reader, lightly referencing the narrative structure of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother.
It was the summer of 2004 when I first met Kal Penn through his mate, John Cho. Mr Cho won my teenage heart over in Off Centre, where he made douchey Asian boys seem lovable. (Thanks John Cho, for the series of questionable Asian boys I’ve since crushed on.) So when “Harold & Kumar go to Whitecastle” came to the big screen, there was no question that I had to see it.
I walked into that theater as a John Cho fan and walked out as a Penn and Cho fan.
The second time I ran into Kal Penn, it was the year 2007. By then, I was getting very well acquainted with the dapper Mr Hugh Laurie as the grumpy maverick Gregory House. When Kal Penn decided to come along for the ride as Dr Lawrence Kutner, I couldn’t have been more excited. And while his departure from the show was abrupt, how could I hold it against him when he was leaving to join Obama’s administration?
Since then, we’ve bumped into each other, each occasion brief but always delightful. He charmed me as the endearingly awkward Gogol in Mira Nair’s The Namesake and even won my mother over, as Robin’s neurotic sweet ex-boyfriend, Kevin Venkataraghavan in How I Met Your Mother. I’m pretty convinced that his last name sealed her allegiance.
In 2014, Penn starred in Ravi Kumar’s docudrama, Bhopal: A prayer for rain. Through the lens of a fictitious character, the film traces the events that led to one of the biggest industrial disasters in the world. Nestled between household names such as Rajpal Yadav and Martin Sheen, Penn takes up the role of Motwani, a wisecracking journalist on the never-ending quest to expose the neglect that lined the rancid underbelly of Union Carbide’s Bhopal factory, which ultimately led to the chemical industrial disaster in December 1984, now known as the Bhopal disaster.
This movie would have gathered dust in my Netflix queue had it not been for Darpan, an international film festival helmed by United Entertainment and Media Pte Ltd. I was fortunate enough to be invited to take a first peek at the Singapore premiere.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I came to meet Kalpan Suresh Modi, also known as Kal Penn, on a balmy evening in Singapore.