Ridley Scott’s The Martian opened last week to some pretty stellar reviews. However, the film has received backlash for some of its casting choices—namely, a couple of Asian-American characters from the book appear as non-Asian-American in the movie. Black actor Chiwetel Ejiofor and white actress Mackenzie Davis play roles that were written as Asian-Indian and Korean-American in the book, respectively.

Look, I’m not here to say South Asians have had it particularly rough in this country. I’m also not here to say white-washing isn’t a serious problem in Hollywood. But I am here to say: Really, Ridley Scott? If I had to sit through the gross-ass alien birth scene in that butt movie Prometheus, then Scott can cast Kal Penn in his goddamn movie as Vincent Kapoor (originally written as Venkat Kapoor), the head of Mars operations at NASA. In a world where millions of Americans watch The Big Bang Theory, in which an Indian character can’t speak to women for most of his life and the whole joke is he may be gay, when we finally get a cool, well-drawn, interesting rocket scientist character, call me selfish, but I want him to stay Indian.

Let's really dream big for a second here: Why couldn't Ejiofor have played the main character, or any one of other white or race-unspecified heroic male roles in The Martian, while an Indian actor played NASA's cool Mars chief who plays a pivotal role in the life-saving mission? Look at all the people Scott had to choose from—Aziz Ansari, Anupam Kher, Aasif Mandvi, Priyanka Chopra, and many more. When the only cool Indian movie character in a whole summer (Irrfan Khan) dies in a fiery blaze as a result of a helicopter-dinosaur crash, we can fucking do better.