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‘There’s Nothing Fake About My Story’: An Interview With Lasse Lund, the Norwegian With an Indian Accent

I asked Lasse Lund, the so-called “White Indian,” whether he’s telling the truth about his childhood on the streets of Mumbai.

By Adam Christopher Smith

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It’s turning-out time at the bars and clubs, but I’m already back home, sitting in the dark, eavesdropping on a video call between a Norwegian man and a carload of adolescent Indians who are cruising through the streets of suburban California; I can tell they’re trying to catch him out, though I can’t follow the conversation when it switches to Hindi.

I tuned into Lasse Lund’s Instagram Live this weekend for the same reason as everyone else: to work out if he’s telling the truth. The basic details of his story are that he ended up living on the streets of Mumbai between the ages of 11 and 17 after his father moved back to Norway and his mother was jailed for overstaying her visa. He claims the authorities failed to support him on his return to Norway and, due to his lack of education, he ended up working in factories doing manual labor. He’s now returned to India to film a documentary telling his story and says he wants to give back to the people who helped him survive his childhood. I can see why you might think it sounds too good to be true.

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When I first saw the videos of Lasse wobbling his head from side to side while speaking in a thick Indian accent, my first reaction was to make a joke about it—the only logical response to a world where it’s no longer possible to tell what is or isn’t real is to laugh at everything. On Friday, the VICE Twitter account shared my convoluted gag comparing him with the author Karl Ove Knausgård—“If Lasse Lund is really Norwegian, then why hasn’t he written a six-part cycle of autobiographical novels scrutinizing every aspect of his life in excruciating detail?”—the next day, we received a reply from the man himself (Lasse, not Knausgård), calling us “retarded” and sharing a photograph of himself as a child flipping the bird.

As clips of him clocked up millions of views, Lasse has spent the weekend responding to his newfound fame, posting videos addressing particular comments (“he must have ate everybody’s food he’s so fat”) and taking questions during Instagram livestreams like the one I tuned into during the early hours of Sunday morning. “There’s nothing fake........

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