March 30, 2020: One score and zero years ago, my father’s World War 2 prisoner-of-war memoir, Eaten by the Japanese,** had its official national launch at the India International Centre, New Delhi (along with the launch of the U.S. edition, which was the same paperback product, except for having U.S. ISBNs on the copyright page…
Exactly 20 years ago, on October 8, 1999, my father John Baptist Crasta, former Prisoner of War, author of a war memoir, and father of four children, breathed his last in the S.C.S. Hospital, Mangalore, India. In his army career, he had seen action in Singapore and Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, besides Papua New…
No matter what you and I think of the rest of Boris Johnson, whose personality embraces bits of both the diabolic Joker (Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger playing him) and “akratic” (his description, in his only novel, of a character much like him), his United Nations General Assembly speech made history (of sorts), and the…
This is a thought that has occurred to me, on and off, right from the time Salman Rushdie issued an apology for The Satanic Verses. And it returns, as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologizes for his various instances of blackface–though books are a very different kettle of fish from crude actions such as blackfacing….
I am surprised to realize the number of Harry Belafonte songs I heard as a child: “Day-O”, “Island in the Sun,” “Jamaica Farewell,” (which I can still remember and sing) and “Mama Look a Boo Boo” (which I only knew two lines of). I may forget, almost instantly, the name of a person I’ve just…
Barry Fruchter, an English professor at Nassau Community College in Long Island, reviewed the first, rather rough edition of Eaten by the Japanese: The Memoir of an Unknown Indian Prisoner of War in 1998, and though I have quoted paragraphs from it before, the complete review itself deserves nothing less than full publication and reading,…
We take so many things for granted. Life, breath, movement, the smooth operation of our four limbs. Until something happens to us to remind us of our fragility, that we are just bits of self-conscious cosmic dust floating around the universe. And something did happen to me: it was a long and painful mess. But…
“I didn’t know that Indians were allowed to write like this!” remarked one of three young Indians (who had recently read The Revised Kama Sutra and Impressing the Whites, located my email address, and gotten in touch with me in Delhi in 2002–around the time that V.S. Naipaul, was being feted in Delhi). Like them,…
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