Category: Race
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The Skin I Grew Up In
My essay in The Indian Express, for the She Said column: colourism, a paati’s first word for my daughter, and the systems we fight that live inside us.
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Who Should Tell These Stories?
We inch our way through the dark aisles of the Movie Tavern, navigating to our assigned seats. This is one of the newer chains near Philadelphia, complete with plush reclining seats and food that is brought to us. My husband, youngest daughter, me, my twins next to each other. We munch on popcorn and sip…
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American-Indian, Indian-American
Collected in The Smudged Hyphen (2026). American by birth, Indian by virtue of being raised by us, the hyphen may define my twins more than either of the terms throughout their lives. “Scarlett eats meat!” M’s eyes are round, her tone incredulous. Before I can respond she adds, “We are vegetarian. We do not eat…
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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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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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Conversations On Race
My girls and their cousins are snuggled up on the couch, sharing two throws between them. The lighting is muted. I am on a reclining single sofa by myself, my neck craned at an angle to watch the movie with them. Every few minutes when a significant scene occurs on screen, I am watching the…
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Identity And Belonging
Two nights ago, I sat in a darkened room at my local library with a bunch of strangers watching a documentary on race. “I am or How Jack Became Black” by Eli Steele is one of those rare movies that catalyzes uncomfortable conversations. I stood by the small table I had set up with snacks…
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On Air With The Takeaway
A month back I wrote about visiting the WHYY studio in Philadelphia to record a conversation with my children’s mother. We spoke about race, about what it means to share children across racial lines. Most of all, we spoke about the kind of world we want our children to inherit. The series is called Uncomfortable Truths.…
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Co-opting Words
I sat between my twins, Laddu on my knee as the opening credits for Hidden Figures rolled on the screen. Pattu jiggled her knee, a clear indication she was done waiting for the actual movie to start. I hit pause and gathered the eight-year olds close. “This is a movie for grown-ups. There is a…
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The Birth Of A Baby: the Parent Voice,
Today, our labor of love the Parent Voice, is born. It has taken hours stolen from chores, children and the husband to bring this to fruition. It has taken the effort of many of us to create content, lay it out, tinker with it and spend anxious hours fussing about it. We have counted…