Category: Musings
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Love Chaos Kin Is Going to the Movies
Love Chaos Kin, Chithra Jeyaram’s documentary about our family, runs in LA Oct 9 to 15, opens London Breeze Oct 21, and screens in nine more cities this fall.
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Mostly, It Is For Me
I stare at the items in my Amazon cart: a pair of leather sandals, dark chocolate bark with nuts, a bag of sea salt caramels. I save two of the three for later and order just the caramels. Yesterday it was a bunch of tee shirts, added and then deleted. A pair of overripe bananas…
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In Conversation with The Indian Book Club
The Indian Book Club sent me fifteen questions about Why Is My Skin Brown?, and answering them turned into one of the more honest conversations I have had about this book. We talked about growing up the darker cousin. About my paati’s backhanded compliments and how a child feels the sting long before she has…
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Idols, Fandoms, and Where the Moral Compass Lives
BTS partnered with Google on an AI ad. Namjoon and J-Hope went to a Chris Brown concert and posted it. One did not bother me at all. The other did not register until I saw the uproar online.
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Feeling Seen
I see the photo on my Pattu’s Instagram story first. It catches me by surprise. I am at the window holding Felix our puppy, watching the birds and the bees flitting about. Felix had been cranky. I was holding him the way I would a fussy baby. Rocking imperceptibly, every part of me focused on…
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I Ran Nineteen Years of Myself Through the Matrix
I ran nineteen years of my own essays through a script that measures sentence length, reading grade, and how often I interrupt myself. What the numbers caught, and what they could not.
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The Color Sanguine
This week I have been hard at work plumbing the depths. I sifted through years of correspondence, pored over pictures, marinated in memories from over three decades ago. Some of what I found startled me. I hold grudges. That one evening in Feb 2001 when I stood at the intersection of MG Road and Brigade…
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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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The Refusal to Translate
A response to the argument that every major Indian writer lives abroad and writes from memory. The real variable isn’t geography. It’s whether the publishing chain between you and the reader lets you keep the sentence intact.
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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.