RAJI WRITES

The South Asian Literature and Art (SALA) festival presented its 6th edition Global Gaze, South Asian Soul on September 26-27 at Menlo College in Menlo Park, CA. As usual, there were stellar speakers, warm reconnections with previous attendees and old friends, stylish attire to admire, and tasty Indian fare with cups of steaming chai. I interviewed some speakers / authors at the Festival - Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan, filmmaker Nandita Das, tech executive Kamini Ramani

People often come to Nandita Das with their own causes. Can you make a film on addiction? On disability? One request that surprised her immensely was for a film about a man who fell off a coconut tree and died. Das has directed films that are thought-provoking, with themes such as identity and displacement (Manto), communal violence (Firaaq), and the dignity of the working class (Zwigato). Nandita Das has acted in more than 40 films, in 10 different languages. Deepa Mehta’s 1

The longtime Mayfield marketing chief launched her HarperCollins debut, Lotus Leadership, at SALA 2026 on her 63rd birthday. She spoke with me about the 33 women in its pages, goddess myths, marriage as a family project, and life after Sand Hill Road. Kamini Ramani and her new book “Lotus Leadership: A Modern Playbook of Ancient Wisdom” (HarperCollins 2026) Photo credit: Marla Aufmuth/HarperCollins When Silicon Valley tells the Indian American success story, it usually reach

Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan and his book "Why We Die" (HarperCollins, 2024). Photo credit: georgekelley.org Before the 2026 Nobel Prizes announcements rolled in, a 2009 laureate, Venki Ramakrishnan who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (with Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath) for elucidating the structure of ribosomes, spoke at the South Asian Literature and Art Festival (SALA) 2026, about his new book Why We Die, living longer and techie arrogance. Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan informed an

SALA’s 2026 Writer’s Workshop draws on Nandita Dinesh’s theater background to explore how writing on the page can come alive when spoken rather than just read aloud. I spoke with Nandita before the festival about her experiences and journey. From Coimbatore to Pune, and on to Wellesley College Nandita Dinesh grew up in Coimbatore, in Tamil Nadu — by her own description, "a small-town girl" in what was then a small town. She first moved out of Coimbatore to the Pune area to at

The South Asian Literature and Art (SALA) festival is presenting its 6th edition Global Gaze, South Asian Soul on September 26-27 at Menlo College in Menlo Park, CA. SALA Bookshop, a new initiative, launched in early September and hosts books by authors featured at the upcoming festival. The festival, and the Bookshop, feature contemporary stories across genres that spotlight the literature and arts from South Asia and its diaspora. SALA Bookshop is a subsidiary of ArtForumSF

Swallowing the Sun is many things. An ode to freedom-fighters, glimpses of whose hard-fought victories would bring to younger readers born long after the independence movement the cost of resistance. A potboiler with breathless romances and swashbuckling encounters with fearsome Chambal Valley dacoits. A feminist anthem, depicting strength and courage in its female characters, despite opposition and setbacks typical of the early 20th century. Swallowing the Sun (Pippa Rann

Read about the runaway bestseller The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, Megha Majumdar's unflinching novel A Guardian and A Thief, The Odyssey and its many incarnations, and Spiderman! Books The Correspondent, by Virginia Evans. I heard of this book by word of mouth, from several readers. In the words of Ann Patchett, “The only thing that sells a book is one person reads it and tells two others to read it. And that’s what she’s getting.” Evans’ debut novel has become a bestsel

Read about a powerful Kuchipudi dance performance in Hyderabad on the goddess Mahakali, storytelling at the Moth Story Slam in Berkeley, and an SF Symphony concert with fireworks on July 4th in Mountain View. Mahakali, a dance performance in Hyderabad (Conceptualized and choreographed by Dr. Anuradha Jonnalagadda) (also, on cycles of creation, is AI going to bring this one to an end?!) Mahakali. She is the fearsome Hindu goddess of time, and death. The Divine Feminine, she em

Geetha Reddy’s play about workplace discrimination was a favorite at the 2025 New Works Festival at TheatreWorks. This year, directed by Snehal Desai, it held its world premiere on June 9, 2026 at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto. Playbill for The Employee Dharma Handbook Leela (Megan Suri), a brilliant Indian-American engineer who is Propulsion Systems Manager at an aerospace company, works on the manufacturing floor with 19 direct reports, preparing for an upcoming spac

The Lunchbox, the film It is a truth universally acknowledged that dabbas (lunchboxes) in the famed Mumbai dabbawalla system do not get mixed up. Over a hundred thousand dabbas are transferred every day using a manual transfer process, and always reach their intended recipient. The system is so efficient that even Harvard Business School did a case study on it. For his 2013 film The Lunchbox, Director Ritesh Batra imagined the unthinkable: a dabba mix-up. The film is a soulfu

Short Takes on a classical music house concert, two plays (Hamnet and Anthropology), and delicious Mexican food. Music Concert, classical Indian music by Madhuvanti Bhide My friend Lata Patil is a tireless champion of women's empowerment and leadership, and I met her years ago through the non-profit Indians for Collective Action when she served on their board. In honor of her late husband Hanumant Patil who was an Indian classical music aficionado, Lata hosted a house concert

Short Takes on a play, Bouquets to Art at the SF fine arts museums, the Kochi Biennale, food and drink, and Frankenstein the movie. Theater All My Sons by Arthur Miller, Berkeley Repertory Theatre Arthur Miller’s All My Sons is a play about ethics and moral responsibility in post-World War II America. Director David Medizabai reimagined this reckoning of the American Dream, from a lens of race, ethnicity and class, and Puerto Rican immigration to the United States. Jimmy Smit

Update: This event took place on February 22, 2026, and a recording is available here: Author Conversation on Color & Belonging - YouTube Event details are below: It isn’t often that the stars align to find three books that are beautifully written, fit the theme of a panel discussion I am planning, and whose authors are available on the date I am planning the event! Before I introduce the event, here is the context. Silicon Valley Reads chose as its 2026 theme Bridges to Belo

Short Takes on two plays, a few Oscar-nominated movies, and an irresistible cake! Theater A Streetcar Named Desire (by Tennessee Williams) I watched a bare bones production (by design) of Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire at ACT-SF’s Toni Rembe theater. I had last watched Streetcar as an opera, commissioned by the San Francisco Opera. My friend Sunita, her mother Lulu and I managed to snag $10 tickets, standing room only at the

The Book I was excited to receive in the mail Salman Rushdie’s latest book, The Eleventh Hour , a quintet of stories (Random House, 2025). In Late, my favorite story in the collection, a retired Cambridge academic of South Asian descent wakes up one day and discovers he is dead. I loved the novel and immensely creative plot, and was moved by the compassionate portrayal of the Cambridge don as he recalls his life and interacts with a young student who alone can see him. The Mu

More Short Takes: on a literary journal, a film, a Berkeley Coffee Shop, and two novels translated from Malayalam. Weaver’s Literary Review (Volume 1, Number 2, 2025) Volume 1 Number 2 of Weaver’s Literary Review, “A Home for Writings by South Asian Americans and Others”, is beautiful and powerful, with poems, essays, translations, short stories and a review. I have read a few pieces so far, and am looking forward to reading the rest. I am honored to have in it my story Drea

“Cut. If not, shorten.” Anita Desai wrote these words in the margins of an early draft of her daughter Kiran Desai’s latest book, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Hogarth, Sept 2025.) This was after the author had cut down a staggering 5000-page manuscript to a still-hefty 1000. Yet, at 688 pages, the published version is still too long, in this reader’s opinion. Desai discussed the book, which has been shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, at a Sept. 21 event at Keple

"Young historian" Manu S. Pillai is a historian and author whose work reimagines Indian history through vivid storytelling and...

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