Actor Kal Penn talks about dropping his real name, his love for Indian-Chinese food and steering clear of stereotypes on screen.

Kal Penn wants a Coke. On second thought, he would also like some black coffee. "I need to wake up," says the actor, whose eyes are bloodshot, blinks exaggerated and cherubic face -that standard Hollywood face of every `American Born Confused Desi' till a decade ago -a bit washed out.

The 37-year-old, tricked out in hip-hop denims, a carefully-dishevelled formal shirt and loose tie, looks like a college kid nursing a bad hangover. A bit like Kumar, his stoner character from the comedy film series Harold & Kumar. Within 15 minutes Penn, who is India, has to rush for the premiere of his latest film, `Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain', a serious fictional drama based on the world's worst industrial disaster.Thankfully, Penn's timing is still intact.

"That is a very good question," he says, raising his eyebrows when asked if this movie was the first to give him a moustache. "It was. I wish it was real."

Never before, not even when he played a terrorist on the TV series `24', has Penn sported even a hint of facial hair onscreen. But then Motwani -Penn's clownish journalist character in the film set in the '80s -drove the American desi to many firsts. The otherwise trendy Penn wore Jitendra-style white trousers, rode a Luna bike with no batteries (a technical glitch that a local paper mistook for bad driving) and, above all delivered serious lines in the dialect of an alien language, Hindi. "It isn't a good thing when you are acting in a tragedy and the crew members laugh after you deliver a line," says Penn, a Gujarati who had to unlearn phonetics, and conquer the differences between syllables such as `Ba' and `Bha' to play Motwani.

It is uncanny how many things about Penn, whose real name is Kalpen Modi, seem to be made up of two halves. There's the smart-casual attire, the broken name, a result of a wild night with friends where other screen name suggestions included Kal Pacino ("It's funny -sometimes people ask in all seriousness if I am related to Narendra Modi or Sean Penn.") and then, of course, the undeniable Indian American identity. "I never felt torn though," says Penn, despite having what he calls "the classic ABCD upbringing" in New Jersey's Montclair."Every summer was spent in India with cousins," says Penn, who grew up ingesting, along with `shaak', stories of his grandparents marching with Gandhi during the Independence struggle. "The family value was always if you believe in something you should do it."

This is perhaps why, while the press was shocked by his decision to quit the hit TV show House to join the Obama administration as an associate director in the White House Office of Public Engagement, "at home it wasn't unexpected," he says. After all, many from the private sector were taking sabbaticals to join the White House."It's just that my private sector career was in the public eye," says The Namesake actor. "Also I was helping with arts and outreach. Not nuclear weapons," he says. The only trouble, he admits, was telling his firstgeneration American parents, an engineer father and perfume evaluator mother, that he wants to become an actor. "In 1965, there was a shortage of engineers and doctors.So Indians knew that that was the path to stability," says Penn.

He is as cool as his character, Motwani, is not. "I don't believe in cultural ambassadorship," says Penn, whose characters Dr Lawrence Kutner in House and even Kumar, while peppered with ethnic references, were never shaped by them. Citing actors Mindy Kaling and Aziz Ansari as examples of how casting in Hollywood is slowly growing colour-blind, Penn believes stereotyping still happens. "There is no dearth of good actors but the roles are limited," he says. "Earlier on, I too had to accept my share of kachra jobs while working my way up."

Talking to Penn feels like catching up with an NRI cousin. He can hold conversations on everything from Hindi films and Indian Chinese food. He watches Bollywood on Netflix and calls Bhootnath Returns "aaawesooome". During the making of his latest film which is shot Bhopal in Hyderabad, he confesses having a `Harold And Kumar' moment when the crew went hunting for Indian Chinese food. "There were no Harold and Kumar mishaps though," clarifies Penn, reminding you instinctively of the scene from the Guantanamo Bay film where a woman mistakes Kumar for a terrorist as he attempts to smoke marijuana and things get worse when someone mis takes the word `bong' for `bomb'. Does he know what a `bong' stands for in India, though? "No." A Bengali. "Oh, of course. That's so good. We should put that in the next movie."