“Go back to your f***ing country” — the words hit me like ice-cold water. I stared unblinkingly at the speaker, unable to process the words directed at me. My face still wore the awkward smile it had when I had rolled down my window to better understand what the passengers in the car next to mine […]
It was love at first sight. There she was, walking surreptitiously across the garden, up the steps of our deck, watching every movement around her; ready to scuttle away if I so much as breathed. She was tiny and I guessed no more than 6 weeks old. She was also skinny and wet and bedraggled, […]
I am listening to my brilliant and menopausal acting coach as she goes through another oneof her hot flashes. “For a couple of minutes my brain shuts down. All I can think of is I amon fire. And I am panicking because I am in the middle of an audition which makes me feeleven hotter…“ […]
I stood in the corridor of a Delhi hospital watching the live feed of a Colonoscopy in progress. My sister; the love of my life, the red in my painting, the bread on my plate; was in the exam room getting a Colonoscopy. For the first few minutes of the procedure, everything had looked as […]
Our mindset is still locked in old forms of warfare, but a new form of war is right at our doorstep. Albert Einstein famously said, “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”We know now that a key weapon […]
Once upon a time, there lived a little girl who dreamt to fly,
so very high
that…errrr…uhmmm… yes…very high indeed.
Little did she know, the highway to the stars was bumpy,
pitted and lumpy
this was told in some tales, the ones she didn’t’ read.
The intersection of caste, class and gender make Dalit women the most unsafe women in India, their official rape figure of 10 rapes per day is NOWHERE near the truth. Another day, another gang-rape story. A victim, whose biggest fault is being a woman, in a culture that regards women as lesser humans. Several perpetrators, […]
My earliest “memory” of America is of my father telling me about the moon landing. “ John F Kennedy said we will put a man on the moon in 10 years and the Americans did it. “ As a little girl growing up in India, I imagined a country called America whose presidents were visionaries, whose people […]
Remember the scene from the movie “Titanic”? The ship has hit the iceberg and taking-in water rapidly. Rose: Don’t you understand? The water is freezing and there aren’t enough boats. Not enough by half. Half the people on this ship are gonna die. Cal: Not the better half. Now re-imagine the scene such that the iceberg is […]
A hyphenated identity doesn’t mean we always get to play on both teams. As an Indian American, it is hard to escape the cacophony of diatribe for and against four more years of President Trump. Indian-Americans have traditionally affiliated themselves with Democrats but today their loyalties are split; two seminal events — the election of […]
I imagine us living on Broadway, both of us
She uptown, I downtown, I could take the train or the bus
And even if no train or bus would take me to her place,
there is at least a straight, known path to her space…
I sit down to write. Never really sure if I weave a story or if it’s the story that weaves me It is creative some days but agonizing in many ways Some agonies just agonies of the art but others are peculiar to my heart. They say good stories come from heart’s deepest recesses whence […]
When she died, I thought I had an ocean in my eyes an ocean that would never dry up no matter how many salty tears it cries. Years passed. The wound sealed. Somehow I lived. My innards steeled. Yesterday I cried again the ocean in my eyes spilled the taste of tears on my lips […]
“Mere desh ki dharti sona ugle, ugle hire moti, mere desh ki dharti”(“The soil of my country produces gold, produces diamonds and pearls, this soil of my land”)[1]” I remember watching the song from the film “Upkaar” by Manoj Kumar on TV when I was a child, growing up in India in the 80s. The hard-working farmer-hero carrying […]
In 2008, India appeared before the U.N. Human Rights Council as part of the Universal Periodic Review process, an important human rights procedure in which States review one another’s human rights records. The Human Rights Council explicitly called India’s attention to the suicides of Indian farmers as a human rights issue.India responded to questions about […]
