Aziz Ansari's Accomplishments

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Fragments

Last night as I lay in bed thinking about my English final, I decided, as I often do, to procrastinate falling asleep by watching Netflix. This may not seem noteworthy to this essay, and under other circumstances it certainly would not be, but last night I happened to watch an episode of Aziz Ansari’s original Netflix show Master of None. The show is about a first generation, 30-something year old Indian-American man named Dev, played by Aziz Ansari, who experiences the daily trials and tribulations of being an Indian man in modern day New York. Luckily for me, it just so happens to be that the episode I watched last night directly correlates to the topic and poem that I am writing about right now. In the episode, titled Religion, Dev is coerced by his devout, first generation Muslim-Indian parents to not eat pork in front of his visiting aunt and uncle. Dev begrudgingly agrees, but, being a comedy show, this agreement …show more content…

Dev’s parents come from India and bring with them their Muslim faith which they try to pass on to their son. In the first scene in the episode, Dev is shown in a white friends house presumably after a sleepover eating bacon for the first time, given to him by a mother totally oblivious of his parents’ religion. Here already the heritage his parents worked to preserve from their homeland is being obscured by American influences. Later in the show when Dev’s parents feel like they have failed him as parents, they mean that they have failed to transfer their experiences and culture gained from their life in India to their son. Dev has been Americanized to the point where he eats pork and hasn’t gone near a mosque in years, and to his parents this is like seeing India being swallowed up by the vice of America, never to reemerge. However, Dev decides that he should, if not to adopt, learn to understand part of his heritage by reading through his mother’s

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