Literary Safari

I didn’t know what to expect of the on stage musical adaptation of Uma Krishnaswami’s picture book “Chachaji’s Cup” this past weekend.  The program billed it as “Bollywood style,” a label that automatically leaves me slightly wary. Turns out I was more than pleasantly surprised. The one-hour production, aimed at audiences ages 8 and up, was  lively and entertaining, while it also touched me with its delicate exploration of themes of identity, filial responsibility, and the importance of roots and ties to the past.

Tea with Chachaji is based on the picture book story about Neel, a 10 year old, who learns about his family’s place in the partition of India through a story about his great uncle’s favorite teacup. In the stage production, Neel’s mother, Anya (Soneela Nankani) is a hardworking nurse who paints in her free time. His father died when he was a young boy and his primary male role model is his great uncle Chachaji (Tony Mirrcandani) who is a wizard with words. Neel (Raja Burrows) can’t get enough of his stories - family stories, stories about Hindu mythology, and super hero characters like Hanuman, the monkey god. On the cusp of adolescence, Neel finds himself torn between his new friend Daniel (Jose Sepulveda) and the basketball court and his family, dance lessons, and attachment to Chachaji’s stories. When an accident causes the loss of Chachaji’s favorite tea cup, Neel learns the importance of his family history and grows to appreciate it in his new environment. At the same time, Chachaji comes to view his roots and ties to the past from a fresh perspective.

Before the performance, the opening question to the audience was “Raise your hand if you, your parents, or your grandparents were not born in America.” The majority of the audience raised their hands, as might be expected. But there were a few people around me who sat still with their hands in their laps and their heads bowed down, seemingly embarrassed. At that moment, I wished I had a copy of Davy Brown Discovers His Roots, an independently published illustrated children’s book by Keely Alexander and Velani Mynhardt Witthoft, to share. It would have made a fine bookend to any discussion or workshop following the play.

The main character in this book is an all-American boy Davy Brown who goes into a panic attack when his teacher assigns his class to investigate their family’s immigration roots. His classmates all have fascinating backgrounds, Davy believes. They come from Mexico, China, India, and Sudan, and all of them have unique immigration stories. In contrast, his parents don’t know much about his past. It takes a series of events for him to finally dig deep to find his family’s roots.

Davy Brown is a likable character, who pulls some clever antics and tells some tall tales to his classmates in his attempt to get out of the immigration research assignment. (Pirate ancestors, anyone?!) But with the help of his family and the mighty Internet, he finally gets some of the answers he is looking for.

“Tea with Chachaji” and “Davy Brown Discovers His Roots”  have this in common - it is one’s family that helps both Neel and Davy connect meaningfully to their pasts. In an educational setting, stories like these can serve as valuable tools to get kids interested in researching their family histories. Once they are ready to do that, the resources to do so are endless — and in that respect, the appendix of Davy Brown provides a comprehensive list of websites and methods to go deeper, as well as helpful information about immigration laws. (At the book’s website, there is also a sample lesson plan.)

Original post at Sepia Mutiny.

A couple of weeks ago, I tuned in to the Food Network’s The Next Iron Chef to find a sophisticated, soft spoken, skinny desi chef cooking up a storm. His name is Jehangir Mehta and his delicate dishes in every episode and challenge have been distinguished by their creative use of fresh herbs, fruit, and spices and their aesthetic presentation.

Mehta is the owner and executive chef of Graffiti, a Lower East Side NYC restaurant that serves “international small plates that feature his trademark affinity for bold flavors and spices such as chillies, sambhar, turmeric, and star anise.” In cook off after cook off, Mehta—who trained as a pastry chef at the Culinary Institute of America, but who hails from a Parsi family in Bombay — has been impressing the judges with unusual and original dishes such as pickled ginger scallops, bitter melon fritters, and apple and soy caramel skewers. His preparations are like miniature paintings; each one a carefully choreographed mouthful of flavor.

Tonight at 9 PM EST is the season finale where Mehta will battle against the Philadelphia-based Chef Jose Garces. Two very qualified chefs from two ethnic backgrounds with rich culinary traditions; it’s bound to be a close match.

Below the fold is a brief Q&A with Chef Mehta, including his thoughts about reality TV, his take on a South Asian Thanksgiving, and his recipe for his favorite comfort food.

Will Mehta be the next Iron Chef? We’ll soon find out. (more…)

Help preserve what’s left of the weirdness of New York. Submit a Twitter’ish length short (about 60 words or so) in response to the question:

What’s the strangest, craziest thing that you’ve ever seen or experienced in the city?

If you have a gem, it will be featured with a byline in a forthcoming guide book that my friends are writing. The book captures and introduces you to some of the city’s most unusual, outrageous, and subversive places and attractions.

Send your submissions to gonzotourismnyc [at] gmail.com.

I’ve been on a brief but wondrous hiatus for the past eight or so weeks, celebrating and treasuring the birth of my daughter who made her very special entrance into this world on September 3rd. I’m not sure whether I’m truly back now or whether this is just a brief hiatus from my maternity sabbatical. We’ll see …

But I thought I’d post a brief little update on a few things I’ve been up to over the past couple of months.

This past summer, I acted as lead content developer and managed the relaunch and redesign of the website of the Student Press Initiative. That site is up and running here.

My article “Rising Tide: The Boom in Historical Fiction About India and the Indian Diaspora” was published in the Summer issue of the journal Multicultural Review. Read it here.

The readers guide I wrote for Ann M. Martin’s Everything for a Dog was published as a super cute bookmark.  Read it here.

The blog Cayenne Lit featured an interview with me last month. Read it here.

Of summer reading, the Presbyterian minister Henry Ward Beecher, once said, “There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.”

I have to agree. When summer rolls around, I’m always on the lookout for a different kind of book — one that feels like it belongs just as much in a beach cabana as it does it on a park bench, an airplane, a moving train, or my bed; one that makes me think and feel just as much as it allows me to relax and smile; one made for my attention span that alternates between the ability to concentrate and the desire to flit about.

I wrote earlier about how much I enjoyed Gene Yang’s new collection of graphic short stories, The Eternal Smile.

Here, then, are some of my other reading picks for this season:

Rakesh Satyal’s Blue Boy (Kensington Publishing).
Hirsh Sawhney’s Delhi Noir (Akashic Books).
Kwei Quartey’s Wife of the Gods: An Inspector Darko Dawson Mystery (Random House).

While I sit here in steamy New York City awaiting the arrival of my first child and reading lots of non-fiction birthing and pregnancy books, these fictional reads have succeeded in take me through the three places that have been a part of my life so far: Ghana, India, and the US.

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When I received my copy of Gene Yang’s latest graphic novel The Eternal Smile, the bright yellow reminded me of his award-winning and best-selling American Born Chinese, one of my favorite graphic novel reads over the past couple of years. I cracked it open, eager to see what his collaboration with graphic artist Derek Kim (Yang wrote the script) had yielded. And the verdict is: Another memorable read! This collection of three short stories is filled with Yang’s trademark unexpected twists and turns, humor, and unique characters.

Yang has traveled far from the themes of identity and immigration which defined American Born Chinese. The thread tying the three disparate stories in The Eternal Smile together is technology–how it shapes, defines, and even disrupts human existence today.

In the first story “Duncan’s Kingdom,” we meet a  young man seeking to win over a princess’s heart by proving his heroic nature to her by killing off a frog king. Fairy tale collides with fantasy in a story that explores the power of gaming in the lives of adolescents.

In the namesake story “Gran’Pa Greenbax and the Eternal Smile,” illustrated in classic comic fashion with vivid sound effects, we meet a greedy frog intent on creating a swimming hole filled with gold. Nothing satisfies him until he spots a smile in the sky and decides to create a church that people will flock to with their pocketbooks. As our frog protagonist seeks out his most “profitable venture yet,” things go slightly awry and we are whisked into a TV studio where we discover that he is actually a “chip-enhanced character” in a popular children’s show, Frog Tales, that combines “the unpredictable drama of reality Tv with the anthropomorphic fun of Saturday morning cartoons.”

The final gem in this collection is “Urgent Request,” my favorite story about an office worker named Janet whose mundane existence takes an exciting turn when she starts receiving emails from … a Nigerian prince who has chosen her to help him solve his family’s problems! Delicate black and white illustrations on yellow paper give way to a few pages of four-color depictions where Janet’s fantasies transform her into a Nigerian queen … But really the heart of this story is a look at how it is not so impossible to seek out romantic distractions from 9-5 frustrations through traps and gimmicks that make their way into inboxes.

I’ll stop here. I usually try not to give away any spoilers. I’ll just say that if you’re looking for a thought-provoking comic that examines the ripple effects of technology on our lives with a grain of humor, this is a book you won’t want to miss.

This interview was originally published at Sepia Mutiny.

As someone whose own family is dispersed over several continents (my husband often jokes that we can’t visit any new country without discovering that some distant relative lives there), I’ve often asked myself many of the questions that Minal Hajratwala did: How were choices made? What were the journeys like? How do they reflect the diasporic experience? That’s what I loved about “Leaving India”. I thought it would be interesting to speak with the author about how she tackled the mammoth task of “deftly exploring … the unprecedented late 20th-century dispersal of Indians to every corner of the globe and their rapid rise in the places they landed” (see Washington Post review).

Q. You write in your introduction that you wrote this book to “find whatever fragments remain here, to trace the shape of our past and learn how it shadows or illuminates our present.” Was there an experience, an event, or some defining moment when you knew that an interest of yours had to become 7 years of your working life?

A. Not at all, it was a slowly growing awareness that somewhere in the midst of my dozens of cousins spread over nine countries was an untold story. The vague ideas swirling in my brain about migration, family, and the new visibility of Indianness in popular culture crystallized when I took a book proposal class with Sam Freedman at Columbia University, who gave me amazing guidance and editing, and asked a lot of smart questions. As I shaped it into a narrative spanning a hundred years, I became more and more curious about how all this happened, and then the questions themselves shaped my journey.

I was also naive; I thought I could research the book in a year and write it in another year. If I had thought it would be a seven-year process, I might have gotten cold feet at the beginning.

The rest of the Q&A follows below the fold. (more…)

In her book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron prescribes the “artist date” as an essential building block of the creative life. She describes it as:

a block of time, perhaps two hours weekly, committed to nurturing one’s creative consciousness, your inner artist. In its most primary form, the artist date is an excursion, a play date that you preplan and defend against all interlopers. Doing your artist date, you are receiving–opening yourself to insight, inspiration, guidance.  [more here]

I used to go on these artist dates all the time, but in recent years, they have been few and far between. Imagine my delight this afternoon when I found myself actually stumbling into an unplanned one after a doctor’s appointment when I had a free 45 minutes at my disposal.

After discovering an amazing but not too sweet green tea flavored Japanese ice-cream called Kinako - it’s base is roasted soybean flour—at Cafe Zaiya, I found myself on 41st Street on one of my favorite blocks in New York City — Library Way. Between Park Ave. and Fifth Ave., the pavement is lined with bronze plaques displaying featuring quotations from literature and poetry. with quotes from great writers.

Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz following the yellow brick road, I followed some of my favorite quotes, crossed Fifth Avenue and climbed up the stairs of the imposing New York Public Library, guarded by its regal lions “Patience” and “Fortitude.”

First stop: the current exhibit [on view until August 1, 2009] of an original copy of a draft of the Declaration of Independence, handwritten by Thomas Jefferson: (more…)

Do you ever find yourself reading one book about a particular topic and then, immediately moving on to another in a similar vein? That has been my experience lately as I find myself on a parenthood books kick. In the case of Michael Lewis’s Home Game: Accidental Lessons in Fatherhood, I have my husband K. to thank for turning me on to it. He sent me an email a few weeks ago with a link, and wrote, “I want to read this book.”

As first-time parents, it starts to get overwhelming to keep reading books such as What to Expect When You’re Expecting, or The Happiest Baby on the Block, or  Secrets of the Baby Whisperer throughout the nine months of pregnancy — books that however well-intentioned can’t help but make you wonder whether you will do the right thing, make the right decisions, be a “good parent.” So much pressure …

Perhaps that is one of the reasons why I so appreciated the frank and comic tone assumed by Michael Lewis in his memoir of fatherhood. A non-fiction author and New York Times journalist best known for his books about baseball, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley innovation, this book is based on his “Dad Again” column in Slate magazine which ran from 2002 to 2008, beginning with the birth of his first daughter and ending with his visit to an operating room for a vasectomy after the birth of his third child, his son Walker.

Lewis makes no pretense to be the model father; one who greets his new role in the world with utter joy and dedication. The book would be a boring tome were he to do so. Rather, through journal style chapters in a book divided into three sections (one for each child), he takes readers through his (sometimes knee jerk) reactions to the arrival of his babies, allowing us to peek into his state of mind (harried, confused, frustrated) and his attempts to figure out the role that no manual can ever fully explain.

One amazon.com review of the book warns that Home Game is a better read for men than women: “Women, or at least my wife, should avoid this book because it does delve into the male mindset enough to make me hide my copy for fear that my she might begin to see some of the absurdities of fatherhood.”

Err, this was not the case with me. My husband read the book on a flight across the pond a few weeks ago and immediately came home and handed it to me. “You have to read this,” he said. He wouldn’t tell me why or what he liked about it, but dropped hints that he saw bits and pieces of me throughout the book and wanted to discuss it when I was done.  Uh-oh, I thought … was this a good thing or a bad thing? 

In this book, Lewis describes the comic turns and twists of family and married life that parenthood brings. He writes about juggling his writing career with childcare responsibilities (so different than his father’s generation - “Obviously, we’re in the midst of some long unhappy transition between the model of fatherhood as practiced by my father and some ideal model,” he writes), going along with his wife’s desire to enroll their infant in swimming classes in Paris, taking his daughter on a camping trip with this toddler daughter in California, his drunken passing out in the delivery room, the responses of teachers to the way he dresses his preschool-aged daughter, or where he decides not to share cake with his daughters [read an excerpt] in a real, human, and humorous way.

There’s this one scene where Lewis’s wife wakes him up in the middle of the night with tears in her eyes. He asks her why she is crying and she has no explanation, which only confounds him more as he attempts to console her. Sound familiar? There have been numerous occasions over the years where I’ve found myself in tears and K. asks “what’s wrong? what is it?”, well, I have no answer. Then, I can’t understand why he is perplexed!  This is just one of the scenes that made me laugh out loud and scare the squirrels in Riverside Park away!

Another one of my favorite chapters was where Lewis tries to slip back into the work routine after the birth of his second child and quickly learns that he is quickly earning the reputation with his wife as a “neglectful father.” How does he remedy it? He agrees to take his wife and infant to a Baby Brigade movie night where he quickly learns rule # 1 of fatherhood: “If you don’t see what the problem is, you are the problem.” Yes, this may be construed as a fingerpointing exercise at his nagging wife by some readers, but to me, it was also a comical, almost caricaturist depiction of married life that permits parties on each side of the table to better see where the other is coming from.

There are threads of insight and introspection sprinkled throughout the book as Lewis discovers the rules of fatherhood:

If you want to feel the way you’re meant to feel about the new baby, you need to do the grunt work. It’s only in caring for a thing that you become attached to it.

The outside world has a lot to tell you about how to be a father and how to raise your children, and its advice no doubt serves some purpose. It fails, however, to get across with sufficient clarity the final rule of fatherhood: If you’re not bothered by it, or disturbed by it, or messed up from it, you’re probably doing something wrong that will mess up your kids. You’re probably doing something wrong anyway but that’s okay … [you’ll have to pick up the book to read the rest of this rule!]   

Read more excerpts from Home Game here and here.

Ben Okri, the award-winning Nigerian author has said, “The fact of storytelling hints at fundamental human unease, hints and human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.” So true this is when it comes to Home Game, which though written from the father’s point of view also creates caricatures of motherhood and women (as seen by husbands) that definitely make us examine our reactions and better understand why men sometimes shake their heads in confusion and wonder. I have a feeling that his experiences will surely stick in my mind in the coming months as we enter the world of first-time parenting, helping us to find the humor in seemingly tragic or overwhelming circumstances. They have also given K. and I many scenarios to consider and discuss and … laugh about as we wait for our new arrival.

In the Washington Post, Amy Joyce compares Home Game to Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions, which I have yet to read. Maybe that’s the next book that should go on my list–and that I should pass on to K. to read. I’m thinking it will make a good companion read since it comes from a woman’s perspective. I wonder if I will find that to be true.

Jim Rogers was a multi-millionaire investor who could afford to retire and morph into a world traveler before he turned 37, but it took him another 25 years to find the courage to become a father. In the introduction to his latest book, A Gift to My Children: A Father’s Lessons for Life and Investing (Random House, June 2009), the best-selling author of Hot Commodities and Adventure Capitalist writes:

I must admit that not very long ago I would have scoffed at even the idea of having children of my own. Growing up in Alabama, I was the oldest of five boys, and much as I loved my brothers, I spent an awful lot of time looking after them! Alas, I couldn’t help but notice what a financial burden having five children had imposed on my parents no mater how keen they were on us. Later in life, I was too busy working and traveling even to think about parenthood, which seemed like an endless drain on the time, energy, and money with which I was pursuing my passions.  …

In his latest book, Rogers takes a break from writing about his travel escapades or providing tips on the best places to invest your money, instead distilling his life experiences into a book of advice for his two daughters, five-year old Happy and Bee, who was born in 2008.  Becoming a father at the age of 62, when he had the “experience, time, and energy” allowed Rogers to take on his new role with “passion” inspired him to put down his life lessons “in one place, with examples of[his] own experience, as a guide to life, adventure, and investing” with perhaps cliché sounding chapter titles such as:

Swim Your Own Races: Do Not Let Others Do Your Thinking for You
Focus on What You Like
Common Sense? Not So Common
Let the World Be a Part of Your Perspective
Learn Philosophy: Learn to “Think”
Learn History!
Learn Languages
Recognize Change and Embrace It
Look to the Future!

But there are surprises and interesting twists along the way, such as Rogers advice to his children that they learn Mandarin (”It is the century of China!”, understand the significance of the BRIC nations (”focus investment strategies on growing economies abroad”), experience the world’s diversity (”I urge you to leave your country for a few years. You can always return, but you will have a new understanding. Of everything.”), or even something as simple as the importance of saving (”As you get older, you will probably have friends who eat at expensive restaurants every night, buy the latest gadgets or fashion trends, and spend vacations at fancy beach resorts. You must avoid the trap of spending money willynilly simply because you can. Not only is this a road to financial ruin, it can cause you to forget what’s important in life.”)

I picked this book up at the library a couple of days ago, and both my husband and I got through most of it the same evening. There’s something about the combination of sentimentality, practicality, and utilitarianism, plus a down to earth approach to living an authentic life, that appealed to both of us — not just as tips that we hope to someday pass on to our soon-to-be daughter, but also as advice we could apply to our own lives.

One gets the feeling that Rogers sat down to compose this thoughts and sentiments for his two treasures with the knowledge that there is no certainty that he may be around when they are in their twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties  … to be able to tell them all this himself. As someone whose father passed away when I was 27, but who was very much a world traveler, a wise investor, a reader, an explorer, and an adventurer, Rogers’ perspective was the perfect father’s day gift that fell into my lap.

I was intrigued, but slightly skeptical when I signed up for a cooking class at the newly-opened Indian Culinary Center a few weeks ago. What could I, a vegetarian who has been cooking desi food pretty regularly for the past couple of years, learn that was new and interesting in an Indian Vegetarian Delights Class? A lot, it turns out.

The ICC is run by Geetika Khanna, a former psychologist and graduate of the French Culinary Institute who has been charting a path in the food industry for the past 10+ years. I really felt like I was walking into another world when I rang the buzzer of 131 W. 23rd St., which turned out to be the Chelsea Inn, a cosy bed and breakfast whose ground floor industrial kitchen turned out to be the cooking school of the now-defunct culinary arts program of The New School, where it turns out, Khanna used to be an instructor.

On this particular Tuesday night, nine of us had signed up to spend the evening learning how to cook with Khanna, a tall, relaxed, and skilled instructor who weaves anecdotes about her family in with technique tips and practical approaches on how to make Indian cooking a part of your culinary repertoire, instead of something exotic and inaccessible. For those like me, who generally cook at least one or two Indian meals a week, it was the practical tips like how to clean your spice grinder — run a piece of bread through it — and the ease and humor with which Khanna made cooking a six-course meal seem doable (from scratch, using mostly fresh ingredients) that was the tipping point. Plus, I enjoyed her running commentary on colonialism, the evolution of the Indian “curry,” and the Food Network —and she gave me the courage to fry my first pooris, a big deal for a gal who has always had a fear of deep frying. There were also a few surprises along the way, like the fact that she uses cayenne pepper in her masala dhaba. [Click on the narrated slideshow above for a walk-through of the class and a look at our full menu.]

The menu for that day’s class was what Khanna referred to as a typical Sunday breakfast meal that her North Indian-Punjabi household would eat in Delhi. In my Sindhi home, it would be dinner or lunch and there would be many more fried foods! So yes, the variation is incredible, but here in the US, there are common denominators to the term “Indian cuisine” and certain lines do, I think, get blurred. For example, when I first started cooking, I made dishes based on recipes I found online (because it’s easier than trying to get my mom to talk to me about measurements) and so, they were always slightly different than what I grew up eating. It’s only now that I’m starting to figure out how to adjust the spices and ingredients so that they taste more like my grandmother and mother’s food.

The three and a half hour class cost $55, and was followed by a delicious six-course meal. A pretty good deal for an evening out in NYC where you’re learning, eating, and meeting a bunch of interesting people. (Other NYC cooking classes range from $100 to $200 per person).

At present, Khanna offers classes every month, and has plans to invite other chefs of Indian cuisine to teach at the ICC. With all the regional variations of Indian food plus diasporic foods such as Indian Chinese, West Indian, and Indo-French, as well as the wealth of Indian chefs in the New York area, I’m sure there are many more yummy lessons and treats to return to at the ICC. I’ll definitely be going back.

Oh, and if anyone is interested in interning with Khanna, she’s looking. Drop her a line.

I’m a creature of habit and making lists is at the top of my “habit list.” My day does not go right unless I sit down in the morning and make a list of goals, things to do, and even, places to go. My father used to make lists too. After his death, I found yellow legal notepad after yellow legal notepad filled with numbered lists of his daily goals. I’m sure that if he were alive today for me to ask him what he liked best about his list-making (apart from the direction it gave him), he would answer, “Crossing out things!”

There’s also something lyrical about lists, the way one line flows into the other, creating a rhythm and space in which to find yourself. I suppose that’s what attracted me to the anthology of original children’s list poems, Falling Down the Page, edited by Georgia Heard (Roaring Brook Press, 2009).

Inspired by Walt Whitman’s classic list poem Song of Myself, this collection of original poems highlights a variety of styles, all of which are tied together by the common themes of school and the everyday experiences of the school year. Featured authors include Jane Yolen (”In My Desk”), Marilyn Singer (”In My Hand”), Eileen Spinelli (”Creativity”),  Bobbi Katz (”Things to Do If You are the Sun”), and one of my favorite poets, Naomi Shihab Nye (”Words in My Pillow”).  The poems span a range of moods — lighthearted, serious, thoughtful, funny, and whimsical. There’s something for every type of kid here.

Besides my fascination with lists, there was also something about the size of the book that I found extremely appealing. Laid out vertically at 5×10 inches, its topsy-turvy text, curvy font treatment of titles, and offbeat design are a visual invitation to readers to think differently — outside of the standard horizontal box of our minds — and to sit down and invent our own list poems.

I recently wrote a piece, “Summer School: Play with Words” for Kahani magazine (forthcoming in the Summer 2009 issue). Building upon my previous advice at A+ Advice for Parents, it offers ideas for wordplay exercises. I wish I’d come across Heard’s anthology earlier so that I could have also recommended it to readers. Oh well; better late than never. If you have school age children, why not sit down with them and write a list poem this summer? Or, you could do what I did after earlier today, after re-reading Falling Down the Page: sit down with your own pencil and sheet of paper and see what emerges.

Below the fold is my little list poem inspired by the cloudy skies we’ve had in NYC of late.

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