[ Study | Chai Room | Garden | Launch Pad | Mailroom ]
Welcome to the Chai Room, where the literati mingle with us, the illiterati ;) Pull up a chair. We'll pour you a steaming porcelain cup of chai,
Indian-style, with sugar and lots of milk. Would you like sônf or ginger with that?
 | Authors | | |
| Divakaruni is an excellent South Asian
poet & writer from the S.F. Bay Area.
Her subject matter is diasporic Indian
women and men. She has previously
published three books of poetry. Her
style is simple and vivid, and much of
her work is semi-autobiographical. Divakaruni grew up in India, earned a Ph.D. in English at UC Berkeley, and is currently juggling a professorship at Foothill College, motherhood, and her book tour. I'm not much of a poetry reader and usually find it hard to read poetry unless I find it gripping, evocative, haunting, and calling out to me in personal way. Chitra Divakaruni's poetry is all of this for me. --Sonya Pelia
| |||
|
| ||
| I caught Chandra during his Seattle
book tour last year. He was
swallowed up by a large black jacket
with its sleeves rolled up, and he spoke
quietly and with none of the air of the
polished storyreader. A few of us took
him out to dinner that evening. Seattle
lay dark that night, and spaghetti in
strange cities always hints at adventure.
Chandra was the most animated telling
uproarious traveling stories of Mexico.
He's a devoted Bombayite (is there
any other kind?) and an aspiring film
writer. Chandra is very soft-spoken. It took him five years to finish the book, and I could imagine him slaving away at the screen over many a late night, putting aside his programming and his film projects to work on his manuscript. Oh yes, this gifted writer is a computer geek as well. If he only used Word I might actually identify with him :^) | ||
|
| ||
|
| ||
| This man has one of the sharpest book
reading manners I've ever
encountered. He's witty and dry,
bawdy and British at the same time. He's also obsessed with sex, but can't we chalk that up to living on the Island?
| |||
|
| ||
| One of the most pointed, incisive
writers I've ever had the pleasure of
reading! .
| |||
|
| ||
| Kirin Narayan is professor of
anthropology at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison. | |||
|
| ||
Salman Rushdie
| |||
|
| ||
[No picture] | Bharati Mukherjee immigrated to the
U.S. in 1961. She completed her MA
and PhD at the Iowa Writers'
Workshop and has published five
books of fiction since then. In 1988
she won the National Book Critics
Circle Award for The Middleman and
Other Stories. Mukherjee is a professor of creative writing at my alma mater. In a well-known Bill Moyers interview she states that immigrants must "violently murder" their old selves upon coming to the U.S. Needless to say, her extreme assimilationalism is not popular. Her characters, especially Jasmine, are modeled on that belief. She hates being called an ethnic writer, preferring instead to be considered American. Although I disagree with her views, I respect her right to express them. What bothers me is how she plays to the dominant culture's perceptions of South Asian cultures (exoticized women, misogynist men, terrorist Sikhs) and exploits these tired themes to sell millions of books. Some of her stories seem virulently anti-South Asian, yet she is hailed as a leading voice of the community. She frequently writes as a Bengali aristocrat, yet mainstream critics call her a realist. She's schizophrenic about her fame, sometimes claiming to not be representative of the culture, other times playing it up to increase her sales. Ever see the cover of Jasmine in paperback? You could not find a more Asian-exotic model in catalogs for mail-order brides. Due to her success, she is a role model of sorts in the South Asian American community, but she refuses to play the part. When I was a student at UC Berkeley, she consistently refused to meet with South Asian student groups on campus to talk about her work. I love her and I abhor her. She has broken into the establishment but she IS the establishment. She's a wonderful writer and an Uncle Tom. She makes her livelihood off a culture but won't connect with its people. She has garnished my personal narrative in a way that's both intensely personal and intensely sour. There's no lack of alternate voices - it's just that she plays the marketable themes very nicely. And if they happen to confirm all the dominant culture's biases, feed the misperceptions, and denigrate the culture, then so be it.
|
Manish Vij
