Kondabolu. Exactly the kind of name someone wanting to mimic an Indian accent would love to use.

Throw in a head stir — neither a nod nor a shake — a sing-song lilt and hahaha, everyone’s in splits.

It gets monotonous after a while. Having to smile at the next white guy who thinks he’s entertaining you while not sounding anything like any Indian you know.

So I find it deeply, intrinsically satisfying that the comedian named Hari Kondabolu has the last laugh on the funny-not-funny but much beloved The Simpsons character of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, with his documentary The Problem With Apu. Apu’s accent, he says, using a line from an older riff, sounds like “a white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father.”

What is that, you say? Every character is caricaturized on the Simpsons?

Trouble is, unlike those other characters, Apu cemented the only dimension through which to represent Indians in whitestream media.

Oh lighten up. Like Kondabolu, I, too, enjoy The Simpsons. Like many Indians and people of Indian origin, I found Apu hilarious for a long time. You laugh along when you think everyone’s laughing with you.

Over time you realize the joke’s on you.

Too many telephone interviews for jobs suddenly lapsing into awkward silences after the first exchange of pleasantries force you to see things differently.

A more pointed example occurred at a workplace after I made a self-deprecating comment about my accent. A white woman began saying, “Pardon?” in a patronizing way every time I spoke. Fortunately she was dumb enough to be overly blatant about it. That she weaponized my accent was illuminating.

Racism is usually talked about in optical terms, based on the visibility of “otherness.” Accents are the less explored stumbling blocks to employment, promotion and social mobility.

I have even coined a term for people like me — the audible minority.

I use it for “non-native” accents of English that, unlike British and settler colony accents, are assigned a lower social value.

My experience is backed by data. American researchers conducted two experiments to evaluate the glass-ceiling bias against non-native English speakers, in a study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2013. In one experiment they asked graduate and undergraduate students to valuate candidates of similar age, attractiveness, education and work backgrounds for a middle-management position. Native speakers were 16 per cent likelier to be recommended for the job.

“Wanting to avoid possible bias in established companies, many skilled immigrants turn to entrepreneurship,” the authors wrote in the Harvard Business Review. “Therefore, our second study focused on new-venture funding.” Here too, they found speakers with American accents were 23 per cent likelier to have received funding.

Over in Europe, a recent paper concluded that Dutch students at the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences did not take seriously lecturers from an Indonesia university who spoke with an accent.

“Accent is used as a signal that the speaker is part of an out-group and statements made by a speaker with a heavy accent are perceived as less truthful,” the researcher writes.

Both recommend raising awareness of accent bias as the first step to mitigating it.

The Problem With Apu shows that with Indian accents, that bias is out in the open.

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“There are accents that by their nature, to white Americans, sound funny. Period.” The Simpsons executive producer Dana Gould says in the documentary.

In a 2007 radio interview, Hank Azaria regaled the host with a story from the writers’ room: “Right away they were like ‘Can you do an Indian accent and how offensive can you make it?’ …”I was like, ‘It’s not tremendously accurate. It’s a little, uh, stereotype,’ and they were like, ‘Eh, that’s all right.’”

Hank Azaria of Simpsons' fame reveals the origins of Apu live on a cool paltalk show. HILARIOUS version of Apu singing Beatles song.

Even Apu’s last name is an Anglo-centric riff on long South Indian surnames. Some 28 years ago, when Apu first appeared, diasporic Indians were relieved to be acknowledged on their television screens.

After years of being remembered, if at all, by Peter Seller’s “Birdie num num” in the 1968 film The Party, Azaria’s Emmy-winning voiceover saying “Come again, thank you” still represented change: being a crafty convenience store owner in an arranged marriage, with 8 kids was still a giant leap from the black-magic-practising, monkey-brain eating Indian dude reveling amid grinding animalistic poverty in Indiana Jones: The Temple of Doom.

But that characterization of Apu, in which his accent was the chief trait, never evolved.

Then 2012 rolled along and there was Ashton Kutcher in brownface, playing “Raj the Bollywood producer” who was “created to provoke a few laughs,” the makers of PopChips said.

Directed by: Aristotle Athiras

Earlier this year, the actor Kal Penn whipped out a few old audition scripts he got “ Jeez I remember this one!” he said in a tweet. “They were awful. “Can you make his accent a little more AUTHENTIC?” That usually meant they wanted Apu”

In Master of None, Aziz Ansari has a whole episode on auditioning for a role, where he is told to pretend to have an Indian accent for the role of “Unnamed cab driver.”

The resistance is finally finding voices.

“The response to 9/11 has created a generation of highly politicized south-Asian Americans who are pushing back against the model-minority label and finding new commonality with black America,” wrote Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian in May.

In the documentary, Kondabolu places Apu in the legacy of minstrelsy. The film came about after a two-minute segment Kondabolu wrote on a TV show Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, went viral. Bell, who is Black, talked Kondabolu into writing about the lack of Indian characters on TV.

Kondabolu taking on a beloved icon, the emergence of Penn and Ansari and Mindy Kaling and Hasan Minhaj – comedy might just turn out to be the best antidote to mockery.

Shree Paradkar writes about discrimination and identity. You can follow her @shreeparadkar