Last Word
Sarita Sarvate’s monthly column, Last Word has been featured in India Currents for the last twenty-five years. Her experience as an immigrant who arrived in America to attend graduate school at a time when few Indian women ventured to a foreign land lends her perspective a unique mix of global villager/desi vernacular flavor.
An avid connoisseur of Americana, her columns straddle her native and adopted cultures. The topics she writes about range from global politics, society, culture, feminism, and memoir. She believes in living true to one’s desires and beliefs even if it means being relegated to the margins of society.
What About Bill?
How the dominoes have fallen. Ever since producer Harvey Weinstein was exposed as a sexual predator, the list of prominent men charged with sexual harassment has grown. Some of these men, like comedian Louis C.K., and actor Kevin Spacey, have been my idols. Even NPR’s...
Is Identity Politics Passe in the Age of Globalization?
After spending a month in Catalonia, I returned to California in September even as the referendum took place there. Looking back, I marvel at my naiveté as I set off for a writers’ residency in the high Pyrenees in early August, never suspecting that I was traveling...
Is The Handmaid’s Tale a Feminist Tract?
I have always had difficulty with Margaret Atwood’s writings, perhaps because her visions of the future are too dark. Listening to the audio version of The Blind Assassin, I got thoroughly confused. No surprise then that I hadn’t read her classic, The Handmaid’s Tale,...
Are Indian Weddings Too Ostentatious?
I saw Monsoon Wedding, the new musical, with a group of Indian women friends recently. We laughed at familiar idiomatic expressions, translated, at times awkwardly, from Hindi into English. We got nostalgic listening to old melodies. I even got teary-eyed when a...