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A rib-tickling Indo-Canadian talk show host
TORONTO: Indo-Canadian Mo-D is probably the only South Asian in the whole of North America with his own TV talk show. The show, "Ishtyle", on the prime time Omni 2 channel, is the talk of Toronto's multi-ethnic community because of its humour. Born and brought up in Toronto, Mo-D, a play on his last name "Mody", has that quintessentially Canadian sense of humour -- the ability to crack up about others and himself. "When I started on radio, Mody just wasn't cool enough. So I dropped the y and put a hyphen in between," Mody told IANS in an interview. Starting with community radio where he soon got his own show, Mo-D moved to CHFI 98.1, a popular music channel, after getting a diploma in radio from Humber College. "One day I heard on the radio that the local community radio station was looking for volunteers. I called up, started the next Monday, and soon had my own show." While he was doing a movie promotion, a CFMT channel reporter interviewed him. "I decided to take over the interview - and I was asking her the questions rather than the other way around!" He was called over by the station and asked if he was interested in doing a slot on a new South Asia programme being planned for airing. "They told me what the show was looking for and I told them what I wanted to do. I wanted to do a show that was totally different from anything that had been on TV, and where South Asians could say 'now THAT is my show'." Growing up in Toronto, Mo-D often had friends telling him they saw this or that show that had Indians dancing on the screen. "But now I have Chinese, Africans -- all people come and say they saw this very funny show. There is no format, we tape in studio. We are not live but we are live because we don't retake anything. It is so much based on improvisation that if we took a second or third take, the humour would go out of it," he contends. He is one of those talk show hosts that you'd think was born with a microphone in his hand or a TV camera before him. Mo-D sticks it to South Asians, just as much as he sticks it to non-South Asians -- he doesn't like to discriminate. He believes he is one of those rare second-generation Indians that dared to explore, dared to walk out on first business school and then marketing school, before finding out what he wanted to do. There are South Asian shows and South Asian hosts, he contends, but not anyone that hosts talk shows. "My ultimate goal is to have my very own one-hour talk show. It's half an hour right now as a sacrifice I had to make for moving it to prime time - Sunday 6.30. I said I would take the sacrifice and make do and make it that much better," he says. The name of his show, "Ishtyle", instantly hits a chord among Indo-Canadians, who make up one of the major ethnic minorities in the Greater Toronto Area. He came up with the idea for the show by watching other South Asian shows and thinking there was so much opportunity to do something bigger. "I thought - let me do something that puts South Asians in a bright light where other cultures can see it as well and not say - I saw your South Asian show" but rather that they saw a show that was funny. "Ishtyle" is in its fourth season, with Mo-D doing 44 shows, September to June. OMNI 2 is picked up across Ontario and on satellite across Canada. He started his own production company, Mo-D Media Productions, a year ago and wants to do documentaries and then move on to movies. "I want to take 'Ishtyle' to the U.S," he said. Among his guests on the show have been Robert Townsend and Canada's synchronised women's swimming team. Mo-D believes in a way he is following his parents' dreams when they migrated to Canada. "Lot of kids don't explore enough because parents have set a course for them," Mo-D says. When he finally decided radio and TV were going to be his business, they gave him some 70 percent to 80 percent of their support, he calculates! "They were uneasy about it - because it wasn't as if anybody did radio in the extended family. But when my mom sees I am asked to give my autograph, she gets this big grin on her face." "Soon I had 100 percent of their backing!" (IANS)

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