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

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