Today, Irfan Ajeeb boards an aeroplane bound for India. The director of Bradford's annual Bite the Mango film festival is going to a training school for actors in Mumbai. But his reasons for going are deeply personal, complex and of relevance to a whole generation of young South Asians.

The news stories about Irfan Ajeeb's decision to take a ten-month sabbatical from his job to take a step into the unknown don't explain the pain and uncertainty nagging at him even now.

Wemet at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, his place of work for the last seven years. Just a few words, I thought, prior to his departure for acting school in Juhu, where he will undergo an intensive 8am-7pm regime six days a week for three months.

Aswe collected our coffee he said he had been up listening to the third one day cricket international between Pakistan, his parents' homeland, and England, where he was born.

He was clearly delighted by Pakistan's enormous score, but said "we" when referring to England. I don't have this dichotomy of identity, not even as an expatriate southerner who has lived longer Bradford than my native London. It is all "we" to me.

Irfan spent half-an-hour chatting to me about the obvious risks of going to India - a fragmented career, missing his wife and young child for up to four months, not knowing if he would be good enough to make it as a movie actor in Bollywood, or elsewhere.

But the body language of this handsome 30-year-old man was telling me another story, one that I didn't quite understand, until Irfan himself said: "There is more to it that just wanting to be an actor. It's been going on for years."

That's when it all poured out - not a stream of anger or bile, but impassioned feeling, heartfelt and intensely thought-through.

"Some people think I am a nutter, friends and family.

They say, 'Why do you want to go to India?' People are trying to make me feel guilty. It makes me more determined, makes me feel 'I will show you!' We haven't got the pain of our parents, the division of India and Pakistan. It's all one to me. I don't see India and Pakistan like that; it's not an issue to me.

"I experienced a lot of discrimination and racism as I was growing up. My family had a lot of abuse.

My life was threatened. I could have become a die-hard racist against white people.

"I went through a phase when I became interested in AfricanAmerican history, Malcolm X, Mohammad Ali, Black Power, the Black Panthers. I had a big poster in my bedroom. My father saw it.

By sitting down with him and talking with him he showed me a different way of how to face up to racism and discrimination.

"I had to go through that for me to develop that change in mentality.

Why should it bother me what religion this or that person has? When Iwas at Heaton Middle School all my friends were white, but I didn't see them as white. I saw them as Tim or Lee. We used to have sleepovers at each other's houses.

"There's so much more categorisation now: are you a Muslim, a Christian, a Hindu? Now I have to justify what I am. Am I a Muslim, a Pakistani, a Yorkshireman: what am I?

"Now is the time to make this move. All those questions, this move to India is me trying to find answers to them, to get away from being under the magnifying glass all the time.

"I can speak to God in English. I can speak to God in French. I can speak to God in Arabic people don't understand, " he said.

He was saying that God does not belong to one religion, to one race, to one country. He was also expressing a young man's impatience with antiquated ideas based on caste, class, colour, money and belief - the kind of sectarian minefield that his father had to negotiate in less propitious circumstances when he arrived here in the late 1950s and which became more polarised from the late 1980s onwards.

Irfan Ajeeb acknowledges this; he accepts that life for his father's generation was tough. But he does not accept the thinking current in some quarters nowadays that like must stay with like.

"I don't see you as white. I just want to know if you are interesting or a waste of time.

"There's this perception that Pakistanis in Bradford are all lowlife. I get that wherever I go. I want to challenge that perception and to say to Pakistanis here, 'You can be what you want to be.' "It is claustrophobic here.

Everybody is caught up with their own little community. I am sick and tired of this whole thing about how you have to do this or that in a certain way.

"I am a devoted husband, a loving father and a loyal son: that's all that matters to me. I am known as the son of Mohammed Ajeeb, Britain's first Asian Lord Mayor. I want there to be the stage where people will say, 'Oh, Irfan Ajeeb?

Mohammed Ajeeb is his father.' "I respect the Pakistani, Muslim culture. I get a great deal out of English culture as well. It's a constant juggling. It is hard work, that's why a lot of youngsters fail.

They don't have a relationship with their parents or their parents expect things to be done in one way.

"Only a few can juggle and balance it out. Being young, being British, being Asian is bloody hard work, " he added.

By taking this chance to break away from the mould, as it were, Irfan Ajeeb is in the uncomfortable position of being a pathfinder.

But his generation is in urgent need of people like him, people who though nervous and apprehensive, are willing to take a step away from set expectations and see what life has to offer.