RAJI WRITES

“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...

Introducing Short Takes   There are so many things I want to write to you all about, and I never seem to have time. So, I decided I would...

A few weeks ago I was shocked to learn that a lovely person I first met decades ago in San Francisco, and again more recently at the...

Silicon Valley Reads chose as its 2025 theme “Empowering Humanity: Technology for a Better World.” I moderated a session presented by...

Radicalization of young men in a civil war How does a young man become “radicalized?” Subject him, his family, and his community to...

“Dictators are pretty good for landscaping and gardens,” quipped Shehan Karunatilaka, winner of the 2022 Booker Prize for his novel  The...

The South Asian Art and Literature Festival (SALA 2024) hosted three award-winning writers of Sri Lankan descent on September 28th at...

While you have read my book and theater reviews previously, Kite  is my first published work of fiction. It appears in Issue 14 of Gold...

Dr. Shashi Tharoor, author, intellectual, United Nations alumnus, and currently Member of Parliament from Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala,...

Yes, it has been several months since the South Asian Literature and Art Festival (SALA 2023) at Menlo College in Menlo Park, California....

In all the years since I first read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight's Children, no book has matched its brilliance, its exuberance and its...

I have moderated book discussions and author interviews in the past few years, and even participated in a Readathon! The recordings are...

The Henna Artist was released just when the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown began, and author Alka Joshi's book events switched to a virtual...

Much of the literature about India’s Partition has been written around the violence and tragedy in the northwest. The focus is the...

Silicon Valley Reads had chosen “Journey to New Beginnings” as its 2023 theme. One of the books selected to showcase this theme is The...

Margaret Atwood, Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, and winner of two Booker Prizes among other honors, graced Stanford’s Memorial...

The COVID-19 pandemic took its place in our lives at the beginning of 2020, and changed life as we know it. Silicon Valley Reads picks a...

The world as we know it has changed. We are suddenly in the midst of a pandemic. Covid-19. Four syllables that have thrown our world into...

In this America, Miles Davis, Trumpeter, composer, jazz innovator, While standing outside a jazz club in New York where he was performing...