'Don't worry gold man of Pimpri, I got your back.' Comedian Hari Kondabolu explains Indianness

Datta Phuge, who ran a chit fund and money lending business, was tragically murdered on Friday. In 2013, when he became famous as the "Gold Man of Pimpri", the town from India where we was from, for wearing a shirt made entirely of gold, numerous news stories were written about him by various international media outlets.

Enter Indian-American comic artist Hari Kondabolu, who often humorously critiques the portrayal of Indian-Americans in the media, lending perspective to the situation.

According to Kondabolu, born to parents who immigrated to the United States from Andhra Pradesh, the framing of the story by the international media as a man out to "impress women" was just another example of the Western media making fun of an Indian man they thought "looked goofy".

"But, Hari would the Western media ever do such a thing?"

"Yes!"

"C'mon, media, you are so stuck with your racism that you've lost what this story is truly about. It's not about a sad Indian dude trying to impress woman. It's about a rich person doing something insane!"

Now, Kondabolu doesn't normally support "disgusting financial excess" but that night he made an exception, as a show of support.

In 2012, on the eve of the premiere of The Mindy Project, the first television show to be written by an Indian-American, Kondabolu decided to take stock of the situation in the video above.

"There's more Indians in the public eye than ever before. There's 14 of us now."

"Now, there's enough Indian people that I don't need to like you just because you are Indian because growing up I had no choice but to like this."

And he described the only Indian character on The Simpsons as a "white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father".

We only put up with Apu for so long because it was still better than this – "us eating monkey brain from Indiana Jones".

In the video below, he takes on the Spelling Bee or the "Indian Superbowl". "Six winners in a row. It gives me great pleasure to finally say, 'Hey, white people, learn the language.'"

Here's Kondabolu on hating Christopher Columbus. Apart from all the pillaging and murder, "Columbus is the reason I have to tell people I am an Indian from India."

And then there's the meeting with the Sikh Captain America. It's just that, a Sikh man who dressed up as Captain America and took to the streets of New York. His greatest superpower? "He can get a black man a cab."