Tempers between India and Pakistan had barely cooled following the brief but dangerous military confrontation between the two nuclear powers in May 2025, when an Indian and a Pakistani met for coffee in Boston, bonding over a shared love for films.

Over that coffee session, I – a Pakistani creative – and Indian writer-director Sriram Emani talked about his new short film, Jam Boy.

I had met Sriram in 2025 at the Boston Asian American Film Festival and saw Jam Boy (run time 22 minutes) at a private screening later. The film is an introspective science-fiction allegory about the psychological cost of belonging to America’s “model minority.”

Its title comes from a disturbing colonial urban legend: In one version of the story, British golfers in India would have a local servant smeared with jam and stationed nearby, turning his body into a human lure for mosquitoes.

Whether literal history or apocryphal folklore, the image captures a recognizable colonial arrangement: One person is dehumanized so the other can remain comfortable.

Reversing the Conventional Immigrant Narrative

The optics of our meeting carried their own irony. Here were two caramel-skinned fellows with the same jet-black hair, our names almost anagrams of one another, sitting on neutral Bostonian ground while belonging to opposite sides of an inflamed border. While we knew the quarrels of our sister nations all too well, I doubt any eavesdropper overhearing our conversation would have been able to tell us apart.

That irony became an appropriate entry point into Jam Boy. Sriram’s film distills the conflict between preserving cultural memory and pursuing opportunity in the West, a rock-and-a-hard-place dilemma familiar to South Asians regardless of which side of the Pak-India feud you fall into.

Beyond the explosive news pundits and cricket rivalries lies the shared condition of sacrificing connections with family and trading traditions once you’re part of the South Asian pack hoping for a career in corporate America.

What differentiates the film is how it reverses the conventional immigrant narrative. Many stories concentrate on crossing the border, securing the visa, and finally attaining the elusive “American Dream”.

Dismantling the Model-Minority Concept

Sriram’s protagonist, an indispensable Indian coder that he himself plays, faces a different terror as he fights for the chance to finally go “back home” to India after proving his worth to his new-found nation.

Taking the shape of speculative fiction rather than the grounded immigrant stories we are used to seeing, the world of Jam Boy shows us a near-future America and an opaque credit system that determines whether Sriram can work, travel, or visit his ailing mother.

He follows the rules with the belief that good performance will eventually earn him his freedom. However, the demands of his worth grow deeper the more utility he exhibits, and his goal remains elusive, continuously moving further away.

The film’s power comes from how little exaggeration it actually needs. While the flashy algorithms, bureaucratic restrictions and invisible ceilings are heightened in the body of the film, any immigrant watching it will recognize the feeling of suffocation and entrapment that kick in right at the beginning when we see Sriram’s character reveal his goal of being able to visit his home.

At its thematic core, Jam Boy dismantles the model-minority concept and reframes the immigrant’s idea of success in the West as little more than evidence of compliance with the status quo. The immigrant is praised for being useful, productive, and undemanding while the system quietly discourages dissent. Acceptance is only feigned at the cost of making oneself smaller.

Acclaimed in Festivals and Conversations

If you gave image and music to the conversation Sriram and I shared at the coffee shop, it may well result in something like Jam Boy itself. The current socio-political sentiment that shrouds immigrants in the U.S. would lead you to believe that we are simply opportunists looking to impose our presence within the country with no intention of leaving. Nothing is further from the truth.

The new nuance that remains invisible in media narratives around immigrants does not have to do with the challenge of making it to the West. It is about the freedom to be able to move freely back to where we came from, once we are established here. Common conversations such as our longing for chai hangouts and time with family members is often followed by talk about visa types, citizenship processes and the latest national travel restrictions.

So, it’s no wonder that Jam Boy has received acclaim at festivals and in critical conversations. The film arrives at a time when the telling of the ‘resilient’ immigrant narrative no longer gels with the modern zeitgeist.

Much-Needed Question for Diaspora

Sriram’s film is uncomfortable, claustrophobic, and deliberately unresolved because the experience it depicts rarely ever offers a clean resolution. It articulates a struggle that remains underrepresented: Not the struggle to enter, but the struggle to remain whole once inside.

The film had its world premiere at the DC Independent Film Festival in February this year, where it won the Best Film award. It also screened at the Boston International Film Festival in April, where it won the Indie Soul Special Recognition award.

Sriram and I have remained in touch, and we continue to support each other in our endeavors. The image of an Indian and a Pakistani sitting together stays with me, chatting not as representatives of rival nations but as two creatives trying to remain whole in a country that often flattens our differences anyway.

Jam Boy represents a much-needed question for the South Asia diaspora, about why it takes a third aggressor for us to see the common struggles that we share, and why it is only in these situations that we remember that our ideas of home are the same.

(The author is a marketer, storyteller, and artist, born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan. He works at the intersection of film, business and marketing while studying at the Business of Creative Enterprises, at Emerson College, Boston. The views expressed are personal.  By special arrangement with Sapan)