By Sumedha Iyer
“Why do Indians smell? So blind people can hate them too.” My mother told me that joke when I was in my early teens. I was both offended and energised by it. This sucks, that smelly Indian person could be me! But it’s my mum too, and she’s telling the joke. Which is delicious. Like samosas and chutney. Wait, that’s a stereotype. Am I being racist? My head hurts.
By Roanna Gonsalves
There was once a little boy who watched his grandfather at work in India, as he cut diamonds by hand in his workshop. The boy watched as his grandfather looked intently at the diamond in his fingers, then turning to look at him, again and again. That little boy was Raghav Handa. The memory of the movement of his grandfather’s hands and head as he shifted attention from the diamond in hand to the face of his grandson, became the heart of Tukre’, a contemporary dance show choreographed and performed by Handa, now on at Riverside, Sydney, Australia.
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By The Drama Queen.
By Roanna Gonsalves
One rainy Mumbai day, sitting in an Udipi restaurant, chai cup in hand, I told a dear friend I would soon leave for Australia.
“I’ll never leave India and be a second class citizen in another country”, my friend said. My chai turned colder and a crinkly skin formed on its surface.