Category: Desi
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Best of the Best: A Review
Netflix’s Bollywood-fusion dance comedy is deliciously campy, brazenly desi, and carries a friendship I will remember for a long time.
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Seeing Themselves: On Diversity in Children’s Books
Collected in The Smudged Hyphen (2026). “That is not cha-na, its chhan-na.” My 11-year-old daughter born and raised in America corrects the white traveler on television sampling street food somewhere in northern India. Our family is of Indian origin. We speak Tamil and English at home sprinkled liberally with words from Hindi that have made…
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Maya’s Dream
She fell with a thud. At least that is how it felt. She had been reading a book she had checked out from the library on Indian History and fallen asleep reading and dreaming about villages and rice crops. Maya opened her eyes fully expecting to have fallen off her bed. The one with the…
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Twenty-Five
Twenty-five years after I landed in Pennsylvania from Madras, the body that slept light has finally stopped bracing. On arrival, race, motherhood, and the home that turned out to be nowhere.
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The Mute Button
The night my caste essay went viral, the rage came from a familiar quarter. On naming, the backlash that proved the point, and who decides what comes into the house.
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What the Hands Know
Felix has been refusing his food. The kibble sits in his bowl untouched, so I reach for the treats he likes, the duck rounds. I pick two. They are circular, and they look and feel like cardboard. I have never had duck, so I cannot say, but if I were to eat one I imagine…
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The Long Count
Nithya Raman is closing the gap one counted ballot at a time. On the slow, invisible labor of the women still waiting to be seen, and the work that outlasts the wait.
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Nithya Raman, Okra, and the Brown Woman’s Second Act
I wrote about Rini Sampath in April. Nithya Raman is the next part of the question. The first act has a script. The second act has none.
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Puthandu, Pennsylvania
Tamil New Year arrives on April 14. In Tamil Nadu it is a school holiday, a temple morning, a meal that takes the whole household from sunrise to noon. Here it is a Tuesday.
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Rini Sampath and the Weight of Hyphenation
Rini Sampath’s historic candidacy for DC mayor reveals the complex weight of diaspora representation.