My dad is an engineer by trade but worked a lot with the people in the Indian film industry when I was growing up. He started out distributing films from India here in the '70s because there was no place to go for people to watch movies from the homeland. So he developed a network of actors, writers, directors, and musicians that became his friends and that he would tour around the country with, doing stage shows of the musical numbers from their films.

It is my sense of exclusion from representation that made me want to be a part of figuring out if we could make a difference.

I always knew I wanted to make films, but just didn't quite know how to start. I was making little short films with my friends but I wasn't quite sure how to put those pieces together for myself.

When I was a teenager, I thought I wanted to be an actor. I worked on an Indian soap opera that was my first exposure to production. But I quickly became disillusioned by acting and seeing that in the movies I loved and the TV I loved, no one looked like me. There weren't going to be any leading roles that would be interested in casting someone with my face.

When I was in film school at USC, I wrote my thesis script about a woman on Wall Street - specifically a woman who used to work at Morgan Stanley, sort of based on her life. Through that process, I did some research.

I applied [to film school] figuring, "I need to find some structure for myself. I need to find a way to figure out what kind of filmmaker I want to be." And that is what film school provides you with. It'll teach you the basics of how a production works and the technical side of how to put everything together, but you could also learn that by working on film sets.

When I got into film school, it really formed a sense of who I am and my sense of feeling like an outsider. If there was some greater purpose to do this, it would be so that future generations - my kids or my sister's kids - would grow up seeing themselves in their media culture in a way that I didn't. If The Mindy Project or Master of None were on when I was growing up, I wonder if I would be interested in doing this at all