and Culture-
Barbie ‘Snubbed’?
“A personal slight against some high-profile, privileged (white) women is not an affront to the gains of womanhood overall.”
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Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin Talking about Love between Black Men and Women
Love is what makes the top spin.
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Imitative Fallacy?
I wrote this today as part of my jottings and reflections on the writer’s craft. Incidentally—or possibly not—this “Imitative Fallacy” topic has interested me awhile because in my current novel, tentatively titled Homeland Blues, I have my South Asian characters whose “English,” in their monologues and voices, would not be “standard” in real life.
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Love is Not the Name for It
Still brown, still female, still not queer, still writing.
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Chinese Balloon? Nope
Maybe the Chinese are telling us they loved NOPE? In that inscrutable Oriental way?
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Bugs Bunny hatin’ on women, Donald Duck riffin’ on guitar, Mickey Mouse takin’ a . . .
All young women whom the current political junta doesn’t like–westernized, assertive, working girls with their own plans–are represented as ball-crushing fiends.
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“The Land of the NRA, the Home of the Dead”
I am an immigrant to this country, with an American son. Today, to me, freedom in America seems to be coming close to meaning the good fortune for my son to not get shot randomly, coldly, in a public place, anywhere, in any-town, at any-time America….
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Roe v Wade Overturned
My Friends, enjoy the future drafted and curated for women by Amy Coney Barrett, who definitely far exceeds at least Clarence Thomas in the cojones department.
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Washington DC South Asia Literary Festival Panel now on YOUTUBE
One of BUZZFEED News’ “15 Books From Smaller Presses You Won’t Be Able to Put Down!”
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Inviting YOU
to the Washington DC, South Asia Literary Festival 2022 Friends, you are warmly invited to the following event: Washington DC, South Asia Literary Festival 2022 Sample More About Love’s Garden And Related Events Below:
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How to Read Macbeth Again and Understand the Horrors of Climate Change
Faced by either individual extinction (death), or collective extinction (climate catastrophe), especially if self-propelled, humans find the idea of complete senselessness almost as terrifying as physical annihilation. In Shakespeare’s immortal lines, and through his tragic protagonist’s unavailing last-minute regret for what he has done out of pride, arrogance, and ambition, we hear the echo of…
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To Write About and From Within the Ineffable, the Unthinkable, the Unimaginable–Can You?
Have we, in some elusive way, been using language as not expression but as count?… ? And fast?
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How Not To Be Taken In By Your Doomsday Prophet Veterinarian: Cats, Love, and ER
but if you don’t give her the benefit of ER, well….
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My Pushcart Nomination
‘After the House Burned Down”
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How to Write a Historical Novel and (MAYBE) not be in it….
Writing the Historical Novel: Reading and Craft talk with Dr. Nandini Bhattacharya–Zoom Nov. 5th 4-5 PM
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Call for Papers on South Asia and Masculinity
We invite papers that are sensitive to contradictions, ambiguities, and affective dissonances that surface in the fictional depictions of masculinities due to economic, racial, religious, caste, and sexual hierarchies and conflicts.
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Announcing the Tasveer South Asia Festival online…. Movies, Books and Conversations
Announcing the Tasveer South Asia Festival online
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Sleep no more
“Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more. Macbeth shall sleep no more.”
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Terrific tidbits
I have the pleasure of sharing the following new works of art by wonderful writers, with reviews and associated events for their powerful voices
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How will you observe this American President’s Day?
Now, I understand why it is important to trust and respect these institutions and figures. We have to believe in something, since much else in American history is now revealed to be quite embarrassing in the eyes of the whole world. But can the answers to my wonderment about the American President’s Day really be…
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Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may be in Utah
I wandered, literally, up and down the bruited and brutal ‘Oregon Trail’ which so many nineteenth-century Americans eager (or greedy) for a ‘better life,’ for the ‘American Dream’ set out on, in unbelievably rickety wagons, with children, wives, cattle, guns, food, elders (most in small quantities, except sometimes children) for the Pacific West and Northwest.
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You can Still watch a reading by me, Usha Akella and Tori Reynolds, two amazing poets, at the KGB BAR, Nov 15, 6 -8 PM CST
PLEASE CONSIDER DONATING TO KGB BAR when you sign up for this event. This iconic, independent literary institution of New York is on the verge of closing doors forever unless we, the public, readers and writers, who want the arts to survive, support them.
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The Three O-s
I will express strong love for Obstinate Older Oaklike men with thinning hair (as long as it’s not orange); I will let my heart flutter a little now and then; and I will even cry as I smile or laugh like a fool. The latter might happen at 7 pm CST tonight when my president…
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Election 2020
Brave New World of Election 2020, half of the voters in the world’s most powerful country (leaving out the word ‘democracy’) have voted for Donald Trump
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November 3, 2020 — what will the next eighty years bring?
Wendy J. Fox on Love’s Garden: “Love is an enigma, but marriage is serious business,” writes Bhattacharya in this novel that spans three decades and three generations of women in India under British colonial rule. The book deftly confronts how, for these women, marriage is often an escape route and the only pathway to having…
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American Rust — review
This is a good time to take note that America’s president, who promised to help the hard-working backbone of American manufacturing toiling in mills, mines and swamps, is now telling the same unrelieved people to re-elect him by committing voter fraud.
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The Great Goddess Comes
Their misdeeds are legion, but here’s a short one: xenophobia, racism, corruption, personal and moral turpitude, lies, egomania, megalomania, and constant, untiring self-interest.
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Please join me for the Launch of my novel Love’s Garden at Brazos Bookstore, Houston, TX
Friends, I have the great pleasure of inviting you to the Book Launch of Love’s Garden, October 27, 2020, 7-8 pm, at Brazos Bookstore, Houston.
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‘I Hate Men’
‘We should have the right not to like men,’ says Pauline Harmange
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Do you like free books?
Would you like to read Love’s Garden for free?
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Read Love’s Garden for free in the next two months
Life’s a story about a journey. I’ve been on a few lately, and have reported about some. But stories have their journeys too. As I’ve been traveling, so has my debut novel, Love’s Garden https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=3121058904637971&ref=watch_permalink Today I write to invite you, friends and readers, to read Love’s Garden FOR FREE, in the next two months,…
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Race and America; Political Blackness 2
I Can’t Breathe
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Where is this city in North America? Three guesses enough?
So, where am I safe? And, why am I having to ask this question?
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Cambridge Writers Workshop reading for Institute International Education got over 1000 views last night. Hope you were there!
“IIE’s mission is to help people and organizations leverage the power of international education to thrive in today’s interconnected world.” “We believe that when education transcends borders, it opens minds, enabling people to go beyond building connections to solving problems together. Our vision is a peaceful, equitable world enriched by the international exchange of ideas…
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Sweet dreams are made of these….
Hot off the Press. Holding my first print copy of my debut novel. I never thought this would happen. So, thanks to all whom I acknowledge in the book and to all readers who would honor me by reading it. Love’s Garden It’s 1898. India is ruled by the British, and India’s women are ruled…
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Literary Durbar! For the Rights of Minorities and Refugees, and against xenophobic mentalities!
*****In light of recent pressures against allowing international students — futuremakers — to stay in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, CWW would like to emphasize their support of international connection and study.******
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The Hills Times presents Love’s Garden, courtesy of Dr. Ratan Bhattacharjee, Associate Professor and Chair of English, Motijheel College, Kolkata; Columnist; Poet; and Editor in Chief of Literary Confluence : A Global Journal of English and Culture Studies
My sincerest thanks to Dr. Ratan Bhattacharjee for writing about my debut novel, a great honor for me, and especially heartwarming coming from a fellow Indian and creative intellectual.
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What’s the TIME?
“Thanks to COVID, we have rediscovered that we are just one species, and not necessarily the strongest one. This virus, in a way, could suppress the human species as we know it—that is, if we do nothing. This makes it unprecedented. It puts our whole view of the modern world—our vision of progress, our mastery…
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“I hate 2020”
To survive, we must learn to be sustainable while not taking this grand planet and its self-sustaining but sensitive ecosystem for granted.
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The Topeka School
Ben Lerner’s The Tople School makes you despair a little about parenting.
Got any book recommendations?
One Planet, Only One 
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