"If The Simpsons had included no South Asian characters, everyone would have been on their case for being non-inclusive. If they had included him, but made him non-stereotypical, say a basketball player or a butcher, everyone would have complained about him being whitewashed. If they had included him as an unsympathetic character, everyone would have called them racist. If they had tried to bring out all the nuances of the South Asian immigrant experience by including a multitude of South Asian characters from different walks of life, they would have been accused of cultural appropriation. So they included a nice, rounded character everyone likes and quite a few identify with, and WHAT have they done wrong exactly?" - Indian filmmaker Gulserene Dastur, on Twitter

"As I see it, there are two primary products that second generation Indian American comedians sell - the ridiculousness of their parents' 'culture' (arranged marriage and 'my son, the doctor' are the commonest tropes); and the racism of white Americans. It is not hard to see why these two lowest hanging fruits are plucked all the time. [...] What Kondabulu has done is nothing new. He picked almost the most identifiable Indian project possible in the US. And he plugged into the market for identity-based outrage." - Professor Sanjoy Chakravorty, author of "Indians In America", to BBC News

"I like Apu [...] The controversy about the stereotyping is classist snobbery - Indians in America don't want to be reminded of a certain kind of immigrant from their country - the shop keepers, the taxi drivers, the burger flippers. They would rather project only Silicon Valley successes, the Wall Street players and the Ivy League products, with the proper accents, people they meet for dinner - by itself a stereotype. The millions of Apus in America, the salt-of-the-earth types, with their less 'posh' accents, are an inconvenience to that self-image of this small group of Indian-Americans." - Sidharth Bhatia, Editor, thewire.in, to BBC News