Not so Exceptional
When I was 30, a well-intentioned, non-Indian adult suggested I write a letter to my mother, let her know how she had made me feel for decades – get it all out. I smiled and said, Indian daughters don’t do...
(Auto)Biography
Immigrant & Internal Pressures
The myth of the model minority has bedeviled Asian-Americans for decades: they are supposed to be the high achievers who bootstrapped themselves through American society, and are held up as role models for other immigrant groups. Prachi Gupta’s family seemed...
Santiniketan, pre-Independence
This review was first published in Parabaas, and is reproduced here with permission. A memoir with a conspicuously literary slant is Buddhadeva Bose’s The Land Where I Found it All. Translated from Bengali to English by Nandini Gupta, the translator...
A vibrant Peace Corps experience
This memoir starts with an arresting line: The year was 1402, and the summer air in the city of Fez was warm and dusty. I walked through the alley that led from the vizier’s palace to the market overflowing with...
A picture is worth….
‘The Talk’ usually means a discussion about sex and reproduction that parents are supposed to have with their children at some point. For black kids, though, ‘The Talk’ has a much heavier meaning: the discussion of racism and implicit bias,...
The diasporic expat life: A 2nd-generation Chinese American in France
This is the kind of book which sounds like it should make good reading. Ann(-Marie) Mah is a Chinese American who has married Calvin, an American career diplomat, and in their 5 year marriage thus far, has accompanied him on...
A Library of One’s Own
Imagine a weatherproofed box of books outside a house where anyone is free to stop by and pick up a book, drop off a book, or just browse. It is such a charming idea, and seems so community-minded and friendly....
Irreverent and honest
North American immigrant writing tends to be dominated by the US, so it is a pleasant variation to come across a book by an Indo-Canadian author. Scaachi Koul is in her early 30s, and a writer at Buzzfeed. This, her...
Reading Exercises
Movie-loving feminists are likely to have heard of the Bechdel Test for representation of women in film. Is there more than one woman? Do the women talk to each other? About anything other than men? It makes one take a...
Feeling like an American
I doubt I can do justice to this very original, remarkable book. But here goes anyway. Described on its cover as a novel, but somewhere between a memoir and an essay, Homeland Elegies is a scorching examination of the author’s...
Sweet, carbonated, but readable
Indra Nooyi’s memoir opens with a charming anecdote. In 2009 she was invited to the White House to meet India’s Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. When Obama introduced her, Manmohan Singh exclaimed, “Oh! But she is one of us!” And the...
She’d rather have you laugh at her than feel sorry for her
Nora Ephron made her name scriptwriting romantic comedy films like Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally, but it was her own life that provided the fodder for her first and only novel, Heartburn. No shortage of fodder there....
Hens and Weans
Shuggie Bain, winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, deserves all its accolades. To successfully distill real life into fiction is something only highly gifted novelists can achieve, and that this was written by a debutant, is eye opening. It is...
Skin colour, politics and poverty
One of those books you are glad your bookclub chose so that you read it! Trevor Noah is of course a well known public figure; this book gave a very comprehensive understanding of the South Africa he grew up in,...
Shallow Inspection
~ The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country. By Helen Russell ~ This is one of those rather unsatisfying books where your interest in the topic or content keeps you reading, but where the...
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