Mainstream South Asian American diasporic fiction focuses mostly on the post-1965 generation of immigrants, beneficiaries of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which abolished national origins quota and facilitated the arrival of highly skilled workers...
Chapter 1: Coming of Age Sneha lay wide awake as she looked out at the skylight. She hated the view of the stars from the building on the most primitive planet – Earth. She was stuck in a planet used only for low-grade research, while the colonies thrived...
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. – W. H. Auden In reading 16-year-old Uma Menon’s debut collection of poetry, it is obvious that W. H. Auden was speaking about her. For that matter, the fact that the author is a teen...
“It was easy for my parents. They wanted to live in America when America was the clear choice, they wanted to get married when marriage was the only acceptable option, and then they wanted to get divorced right around when divorce became socially acceptable. The times...
Hindus everywhere recite their prayers in Sanskrit, conduct all their ceremonial rituals in Sanskrit, and give Sanskritized names to their children. But what effort do we make to learn that language and keep it alive? In a wedding ceremony brochure, when I saw the...
If you’re ready for summer reading fun, Sandhya Menon’s latest young adult novel, 10 Things I Hate About Pinky, features an ocean of fun and a mountain of love. The novel is the second companion book to her wildly successful When Dimple Met Rishi. Pinky Kumar, the...
