By VICTOR ANAZONWU

Film Title: My Name is Khatri https://youtu.be/tcfpu2zlvMY?si=vmqwZWRGevA6E782

Directed by: Dilip Khatri

Producers: Dilip Khatri; Kodhai Thirumalai and Kylie DeVries

Film Editor: Nate Buzelli

Genre: Documentary

If you plan to be in the vicinity of New York come October 15, here’s something to consider for your evening itinerary: Swing by at Medgar Evers College on 1637 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, for the premiere of a fascinating documentary by an Indian, born in Nigeria and living in the US.

It promises to be an evening well spent, especially if you’re a citizen of the world with an interest in stories of conflict, war and migration.

Written by Dilip Khatri and Kylie DeVries, and produced in Las Vegas, My name is Khatri is the story of an Indian family who were forced to flee India following the political turbulence and population displacements that accompanied their country’s independence in 1947. Settling in Nigeria in the early 1960s, the Khatris found a new home In the Eastern Region, where the man worked as a teacher at Government Secondary School, Owerri. There, Dilip was born in 1965. But shortly afterwards, trouble once again broke out in their host country. A military takeover spiralled into political instability, social unrest and eventually civil war.

So, the Khatris were on the move again, this time to the United States. There, they managed to raise a family and young Dilip grew into Dr. Dilip Khatri. His curiousity about his background and how his Indian family ended up in the US, led him to research extensively on the Nigerian civil war among other related subjects. In the process, he came across the book, Elephants, the Grass and a Teacher; Recollections and Reflections on the Nigeria/Biafra War (2022) by Prof Chinyere Egbe.

Prof Egbe, it turned out, was a student of the senior Khatri (Dilip’s father) at GSS Owerri at about the time Dilip was born. He too had found his way to the ’S, settled and raised a family.

This series of coincidences deepened Dilip’s interest in his own life story. He subsequently sought out Prof Egbe and decided to put their stories together in one documentary for posterity. His objective: To highlight population movements due to political violence and its effects on people’s lives.

There are three principal narrators in the documentary: Meera Raisinghani, Dilip’s mother; Professor Santosh Kumar Rai; and Professor Chinyere Egbe. Each brings in their expert experiences regarding a segment of the story – the politics and history of turbulence in India, the strains of migration on human families, and the trauma of political turbulence and civil war in Nigeria. All three segments are woven into a single tapestry about the tragedies of social and political conflict, the instinct for survival, and the perseverance of the human spirit.

Early audience reactions to the documentary have been interesting. Apart from being selected to show at three film festivals in California, Las Vegas and India, My Name is Khatri has already won an award at the Silicon Beach Film Festival.

This promises to be more than just another interesting story with bold historical footprints. It has the DNA of a major contribution to the subject of human migration from some of the largest and most populous countries on the planet today – India, Nigeria and USA. Demographers, historians, sociologists, sundry intellectuals and members of the general public with an appetite for unusual stories must be salivating at the prospects.