short film, The Little Terrorist, has already swept numerous awards, including first prize at the Montreal World Film Festival and the UIP Prix Ghent 2004. It's been shown all over the world, in London, Bangkok and Rotterdam. And now it's been nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film. You would expect Kumar to be ecstatic. And he is, in a way.
"I feel vindicated," he says, with a kind of grim relish. "It's been an agonisingly tenacious wait. For three and a half years, I've been working incredibly hard to create an international career in film for myself.
Here, no one understands what a short film is. They ask if it's a documentary, or wonder what the market is for a fictionalised short film. It's been difficult to get recognition. But this nomination is going to change all that."
The film is about Jamal, a little Pakistani boy who wanders over the border into India in search of his cricket ball.
Jamal is protected from the border patrol by an old Brahmin schoolteacher, Bhola, and his grudging, suspicious niece Rani.
Together they hide him from soldiers, and smuggle him back into Pakistan (the border is surprisingly permeable to those who know their way).
In the short space of 15 minutes, the film raises many questions of identity, of what it means (and in the end, how little it means) to be different.
It is clear that the old Brahmin and young Muslim have much more in common with each other than either has with the relentless, unyielding Indian soldiers, but later it becomes equally clear that the Indian soldiers do not impose barriers as heavy as those the two communities impose on each other.
The guards are easily fooled by a simple disguise, but Rani, for example, will not keep a bowl that Jamal has eaten from in the house, and it has to be broken.
"I've found that making films is mostly about putting forward complicated ideas in a simple, economical way.
The Indo-Pakistan conflict is on everybody's mind nowadays "" but I didn't want to make a preachy film.
There is a lot to tell, especially to Western audiences who think that Pakistan is only a place where Osama Bin Laden is hiding, but I wanted to be gentle in the telling, I wanted to show how similar people are, and at the end of the day I want to show that there is hope."
Although Kumar self-financed this film, and shot the whole thing on a shoestring budget (the entire crew flew in from London and worked at their own expense, and the soundtrack has been done by real Rajasthani folk musicians), now, thanks to how well the film has done, he can plan to make the film freely available on the internet, an important move for universal access.
"Films like mine can also be relevant to policymakers in the West," he says, naming no names, "for I think the first step to resolving conflict is to actually find out about the people behind it, how they live, what they think."
As the question of distribution in India is broached, Kumar remains surprisingly optimistic, even though there is clearly no real market here for films that veer even slightly away from the middle of the road.
Asked his opinion about the lack of theatres that show foreign and independent films, he retorts, "The multiplexes are fantastic.
Not only are they practical and cost-saving, I think they're changing as well, so soon they should be able to show offbeat films that they don't now." He must know something we don't.
Kumar now plans to make his first feature film, helped by the sponsorship that winning the Montreal festival gave him and various equity investments.
This will be a Hindi film (subtitled, and not, as he points out, anything to do with Bollywood), a thriller called Forest, which will target audiences in the US.
"They get Chinese kung-fu, Japanese horror films and Mexican social dramas," he says, "I think it's high time they had an Indian thriller."
