Where’s the Party Yaar?(2003)

Submitted by Tornado Dragon

After Hari (Sunil Malhotra) calls the Music Masala radio station and wins V.I.P. tickets to the Desi Fever party taking place in three days, Ray (Prem Shah) – who doesn’t want any F.O.B. (Fresh Off the Boat) Indians attending the party – calls Mohan (Kal Penn) and informs him that Hari won the tickets. After chastising Mohan for not keeping Hari in the dark about the party, he orders him to make sure that Hari doesn’t show up. Mohan replies that he and his friends did the best they could to keep Hari from knowing about the party and that somebody else must have told him about it, but he is not going to tell him not to come if he has won tickets to it. However, he is unaware that Hari – who wanted to tell him about his prize – is right outside his bedroom and has overheard every word he said, and Hari soon shows himself in the doorway and casts Mohan a look of betrayal and disbelief before walking away. Later on, Hari packs up his stuff and moves out of Mohan’s family’s house to go stay with his friend, Shyam (Sunil Thakkar). The next morning, Mohan approaches Hari at the restaurant they work at and tries to explain himself, but Hari scolds him for lying to him about not knowing about the party and then telling his friends that he didn’t want him to go to it, all because he considers him to be an embarrassment. He lastly tells Mohan to stick with his friends, and he will stick with his.

That night, Mohan hands his father the paycheck he received that day and tells him that he wants to pay for all the charges he racked up on his credit card, but his pleased father gives it back to him and tells him to buy something for his mother instead. The following morning, he discovers that Hari fixed Janvi’s (Serena Varghese) videotape containing her documentary on Indians living in America (which Ray broke in front of her after she criticized him for not letting a few F.O.B. Indians into a Desi party that he was holding at the time), and he watches an interview Janvi conducted with Hari where he told her that he felt like a stranger in a strange land in the U.S., but considered Mohan a good guy for showing him around and stuff. He then calls Janvi and lets her know that he had picked up all the pieces of her tape and that Hari repaired it, and then he tells her that he wants to come by her house and give it to her and then take her out to dinner, as well as apologize in person for not sticking up for her back when Ray broke the tape. She tells him to bring the tape over to her house tomorrow night, and if he behaves, she will make him dinner. The next day, while Mohan is in a convenience store getting some items before meeting Janvi, he calls Ray and tells him that he isn’t going to be monitoring the doors at the Desi party tonight. However, determined to make sure that no F.O.B. Indians get into the party, Ray manages to persuade him to fulfill his duties, and before he hangs up, he asks Mohan to get him some film for his camera as well as some condoms. When Mohan is getting his and Ray’s purchases rung through at the register, he makes a sex joke around the clerk and his manager.

Mohan then heads over to Janvi’s house, and they get to talking about her father and she mentions that he owns a convenience store. Mohan then sees a picture of her father and discovers that he is the manager he made the sex joke around, so he tries to convince her to head out with him now before her father gets home. Unfortunately for him, she refuses, telling him that her father wants to meet him. When she informs him that she can hear her father’s car pulling up in the driveway, he excuses himself to use the bathroom, where he frets over what to do next until he manages to come up with the idea of disguising himself. He thus sneaks his way into the laundry room and crawls out the window in there, then goes to his car, gets out a kurta that Hari gave him, and returns to the laundry room with it. He puts the kurta on and then further modifies his appearance to look more traditionally Indian, plus he decides to adopt a fake Indian accent so Janvi’s father won’t recognize his voice, and he stashes his regular clothes in the dryer. He then returns to Janvi and meets her father, who almost realizes who he is but ultimately fails to, and they all have dinner together. Afterwards, Mohan tells Janvi that they must go to the Desi Fever party because Hari will be there and they will need to defend him from the more Americanized Indians, plus he needs to tell him that he is sorry. Sometime after they leave, Janvi’s father goes to do a load of laundry and finds Mohan’s clothes in the dryer, and he soon figures out that Mohan was the one who made the sex joke around him at his store. Then, after finding a pair of V.I.P. passes to the party in one of the pants’ pockets, he draws the conclusion that Mohan bought the condoms and camera film because he intends to have sex with Janvi and have her pose for sexually suggestive photos. He thus immediately heads over to the party to pummel Mohan.

At the party, Hari finds Priya (Tina Cherian) getting friendly with another guy, Raju (Indi Wijay), and when she and Raju get up to dance, Hari finds out that her name is actually Supriya; she just prefers to go by Priya. This makes him realize that she isn’t the dream girl that the Great Bhole Shankar Maharaj (Indravadan Trivedi) predicted that he would find in America (he had told Hari that her name would start with a “P”), and he becomes depressed. When he wanders onto the dance floor thinking about all the signs that the Great Bhole told him to look out for that would lead him to his dream girl, a beautiful Indian girl loses her footing and falls on him. When he looks at her, he thinks back and realizes that he has had multiple random encounters with this woman before. They then walk over to the bar, and when he asks her what her name is, she replies that her name is Poonam (Mousami Dave), and they immediately start to click.

Hari later goes into the bathroom and crosses paths with Ray, but when he tries to introduce himself to Ray, he gets the cold shoulder. Before leaving to dance with Poonam some more, he mentions to Ray that he is the V.I.P. ticket winner. While Hari and Poonam are dancing alongside Mohan & Janvi and Supriya & Raju, Ray and another staff member try to forcibly eject Shyam and the other Indian F.O.B.s that Hari brought along to this party, then they go after Hari himself. After Ray brings Hari outside, Mohan stops Ray and chastises him for kicking Indians out of a Desi party, but Ray refuses to listen to him. Moments later, Mr. Kumar (Prakash Desai) shows up, and after it is revealed that he is Ray’s father and his boss at the radio station, he fires Ray for being so prejudiced towards his own people. Ray walks away speechless, and Mr. Kumar tells everyone to enjoy the party before taking off.

Before Hari heads back inside with Poonam, Mohan apologizes to him for how he treated him, and Hari forgives him. Mohan then goes to kiss Janvi, but her father suddenly appears and punches him unconscious, then throws him into a dumpster before forcing Janvi to come home with him. Mohan awakens in the morning and walks back home, and he arrives to find his family playing cricket with Hari in the back yard. The narrator informs us that Mohan called Janvi in the afternoon and spoke with her father, and after he explained everything to her father and cleared up the misunderstanding, Janvi accepted his apologies again. The narrator then says that Mohan learned a valuable lesson from Hari about how you cannot judge a book by its cover, and he and Hari became close friends from then on.

Everyone’s fates are revealed as follows:

• Hari and Poonam are madly in love and planning their big fat Indian wedding. They went back to Maninagar to get blessings from the Great Bhole Shankar Maharaj, but he was nowhere to be found.
• Mohan and his crew are now busy with their new boy band, Lip-Sync, and the music video for their first single, “Pappa Don’t Beat Me,” will be directed by Janvi. Mohan and Janvi also enter into a relationship.
• Shyam is still single and desperate. If you are a sexy female, please contact him at D.U.D.E. (Don’t Underestimate Desi Entelligence), a group he formed to help foreign students fit in and “look tight.”
• Supriya and Raju dated briefly but eventually parted ways. Supriya now works full-time for Shyam at D.U.D.E., giving new students a complete makeover and a positive outlook on life.
• After Ray was fired, his visa expired and he was deported back to India. Needless to say, he had a hard time fitting in, and he was recently hospitalized after he botched an attempt to Fed-Ex himself back to America.
• The Great Bhole Shankar Maharaj moved to the U.S. to stake his claim in the booming fortune telling business. You can call him at 1-900-Bum-Bum-Bhole to make all your dreams come true – or if you just want a hairy, half-naked Indian guy to talk to.