This thread will probably sink like an osmium brick, because I’ve never heard anyone else mention The Darjeeling Limited, which was shown over much of last year on cable, in fairly heavy rotation. It tells the story of three brothers, all successful creative people, who haven’t seen each other for a long time, taking a trip on the fabled railroad through northern India. And it has some good Kinks music to boot, I think mostly from Lola Vs. Powerman and the Money Machine. It’s always good to hear “new” music by the Kinks, instead of yet another rendition of “You Really Got Me”, which every heavy metal band in the world seems to do, ad nauseam.
Early in the film we meet the train conductor, and I’ve always been struck by the fact that he seems to have (to me), a plain vanilla American accent–perhaps even a Southern California accent, to the extent that such a thing still exists. He’s obviously Indian, and as such I would expect his pronunciation of English to veer more towards BrE (if fluent), or otherwise more towards a kind of speech in which the speaker’s native Indian language still heavily influences his English pronunciation. But that’s obviously not the case here.
What I ask now is, has anyone seen this movie and noticed the same thing? Or can any non-North American Anglophones who’ve seen the movie say, Oh, right, that’s an XXX accent, XXX being some little linquistic pocket in a remote corner of, say, Scotland or provincial England?