RAJI WRITES

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, participated in a Readathon, and even narrated an audiobook! The recordings are scattered all over the world wide web. I thought I’d assemble various links and share them. Read on, and check out the audio/video links! Here's what follows: Audiobook Silicon Valley Reads author / book events in 2026, 2025, 2023, 2021, 2020 and 2019 One Story One Nation initiative in 2020: a reading of Tagore's Kabul

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...

The South Asian Literature and Art Festival (SALA) returned in style and with considerable substance on October 29 and 30, 2022 at the...

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

The inaugural South Asian Literature and Art Festival (SALA 2019) was held in October 2019, at the picturesque Villa Montalvo in...

During the pandemic shut down, I had watched a few of Naatak's zoom plays. Ramayan was my first live Naatak play in a theater since the...

In 1947, the year India got its hard-won independence from British rule, six nuns from Kentucky voyaged to India to set up a hospital in...

On September 17, 2021, one of the sweetest people I have ever known went into cardiac arrest in the ICU at Thangam hospital in Palakkad,...

Border Less, a debut novel by Namrata Poddar, is a collection of stories or vignettes, tied together by the main character Dia Mittal. We...

Many years ago, I had a conversation with a colleague about life, dreams, and the choices we make. Early on in our career, or in life, we...

Dear Reader, I have not written to you or posted anything since January of this year. How the months have flown by! I last posted a book...

Loneliness is like a cold hand resting on your heart. It can tighten your chest, and make you desperate with longing for company and...

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...

What a magnificent bird is the pelican. This limerick by Dixon Lanier Merritt captures the wonder of the bird. A wonderful bird is the...

Once upon a time, I had a dear friend named Maggie. She taught herself calligraphy, sitting at a drafting table and painstakingly writing...

Sometimes, the universe is kind. In a time of anxiety, even terror that you might lose those you love, it gives you back people you lost....

In cold months, I wear The sweaters, caps and scarves you knitted, Feeling your love In their warm embrace. I picked the yarn, We picked...