A few weeks ago, I wrote this post, giving my reaction to Aravind Adiga’s novel, The White Tiger. Since then, as many readers probably know, Aravind Adiga won the prestigious Booker Prize for the novel, making him one of only a handful of first novelists to have done so, and also (at 33 years old) one of the youngest writers ever to do so.

While I stand by my assessment of Adiga’s novel, I’m not going to bitch and moan about the Booker’s selection process or the composition of the committee. Rather, my first response is to congratulate Adiga for the honor, and wish him luck on his next book. (Cheers!)

I was ready to leave it at that, but Manish at Ultrabrown challenged negative reviews of the novel like mine with a post yesterday. For Manish, the complaints against the novel boil down to a question of different ways of failing to achieve authenticity:

I’m going to tease apart two separate kinds of complaints about authenticity. One kind is whether the author successfully executes what he’s attempting, whether you’re pulled jarringly out of the narrative. The other is whether the very endeavor of a highly-educated proxy tackling the voice of the underclass is plausible. (link)

I’m quite sure my complaint falls under #1 — Adiga fails to do what he is apparently trying to do — though I’d phrase it a slightly differently: in my view, Adiga never seriously attempts to convince us that his protagonist is a realistic figure, and therefore he never really tries to be “authentic” at all.

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I used to work at a tutoring center on a small private college campus in Westchester, NY several years ago. Our offices were a safe space that students visited for help with writing papers, coursework, math, ESL. We hired several peer and professional tutors every semester to provide such services to our student body, and very often, I also took on a small student load. It was tremendously fulfilling work, helping students navigate challenging course material or a tricky writing assignment, watching them come into their own, grasp the content, and produce assignments that met curriculum standards.

That’s my experience with tutoring. Then, there’s the experience of Anisha Lakhani, a former teacher whose novel “Schooled” was just published by Hyperion this summer. She taught (and was even the Middle School English Chair) at the high-profile NYC private school Dalton for a decade, but quit last year following her disillusionment with the culture of cheating in which she found herself.

Lakhani was raking in the dough (over 200 bucks an hour) for private tutoring sessions with the children of wealthy clients on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Her closet was filled with the latest designer fashions and she was hanging with all the right folks. As the Jersey-born Columbia graduate sank deeper and deeper into this world, she discovered a vicious inner circle in which educators, parents, and students were enmeshed: Parents, eager to see their kids excel, hired tutors like Lakhani to help student swith school assignments. Students, accustomed to being treated with kid gloves and occupied with AIM, Juicy Couture, and their active social lives, expected Lakhani to essentially do their homework for them. And, teachers, intimidated by parents, knew not to give in-class writing assignments or to even raise the question of whether a paper was written by the student or a tutor, kept silent.

Based on her experiences as a tutor as well as those of her colleagues and parents, Anisha Lakhani’s “Schooled” takes us into the crazy world of Anna Taggert, a recent Columbia graduate who goes against the wishes of her parents (they could have been desi!) and takes up a job at a private school. Despite her initial idealism and desire to imbue her students with the spirit of literary greats, she is very quickly beset with a host of problems: pushy moms, low pay, a rundown apartment, and a school administration which warns her not to make her lesson plans too complicated (she’ll make the other teachers look bad). As the months pass, Anna decides to take up a tutoring gig on the side to supplement her measly income. That’s when things spiral out of control. Her values go whoosh and she falls head over heels with the all things Juicy and Chanel; with shopping sprees; with blonde highlights; and with the experience of being the “cool teacher” who gets invited to Kanye West bar mitzvahs. (Sidenote: The novel also features a desi character – a fellow math teacher – who also gets equally corrupted by the lure of tutoring.)

Eventually, things settle down and Anna looks in the mirror and realizes who and what she has become — and unlike Lakhani, who has quit teaching and turned into a full-time novelist and socialite — returns to the classroom ready to reform her students and herself. But until that happens, readers will get an unnerving look at the Upper East Side annals of overambitious, competitive, and heartbreaking private education. The novel follows in the footsteps of books like “The Nanny Diaries” which provide the insider/outsider point of view. In fact, by the end of this week, movie rights will be sold. And though it’s not literary fiction by any means, it is an intriguing sociological study into a culture of cheating with a dash of pedagogy and activism thrown in.

“I thought it was time someone spoke out. Yes, certainly there were many hardworking students and decent families, but so, so much cheating is occurring and it needed to be exposed.” Lakhani told me in our e-mail Q&A which follows below the fold. Maybe parents and teachers alike will cull some advice from this morality tale from someone who knows what it’s like to walk in their shoes. I certainly hope some conversations about reform emerge from this book, or else it will be just a fictionalized navel-gazing venture. Continue reading →

In between watching the glory that has been the Olympics (can’t say I expected so much Sepia-related content, but hey, awesome) and signing up to be one of the very few (10,000+ish) people to receive my very own VP text from Barack Obama, I came across this great piece in the NYT Magazine about Hanif Kureishi, his career, and his latest novel, Something to Tell You.

The novel is, in brief, about a member of the rebellious British South Asian generation, Jamal, that came of the age during the 80’s, and how he and his now successful peers have to overcome their past conflicts, loves, secrets, and continuing personal challenges as middle-aged parents and professionals. It actually sounds familiar in theme to My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru (a very nice book), except with a South Asian focus, and from the British reviews that have been published, it seems as though it will be a good read. I’ll be looking forward to reading it and the review world seems to see it as an improvement over his previous few novels, which have not been critically well-received. South Asian blog reviews of this novel have already been written, and it is to come out in America on August 19th.

The article highlighted more than his new novel – in particular, it noted how Kureishi’s emergence on the scene during the late 1980’s and his writings, including the screenplay of “My Beautiful Laundrette” and the novel Buddha of Suburbia gave a voice to a generation of South Asians in Britain that felt unrepresented and typecast in British society at the time:

The novel and a subsequent BBC mini-series made Kureishi a hero to a generation of British Asians and other nonwhites, a kind of postcolonial Philip Roth who brought to the mainstream themes that were previously relegated as “ethnic” and added lots of sex and humor. “What, above all, made Kureishi a talismanic figure for young Asians was his voice,” the critic Sukhdev Sandhu wrote in The London Review of Books in 2000. “We had previously been mocked for our deference and timidity. Kureishi’s language was a revelation. It was neither meek nor subservient. It wasn’t fake posh. Instead, it was playful and casually knowing.“

Kureishi’s most important role was to knock down the stereotypical image of South Asian immigrants as the hard-working, polite and dutiful members of society who would make nor do no trouble. For a group of immigrants that had historically faced a great deal of discrimination in the U.K., there was finally someone who articulated their true lives and struggles. Perhaps most importantly, the writings were not staid nor politically correct – they showed life as it really was for immigrants and their children:

Sandhu (the critic) recalls how his father — who left India for England in 1965 and worked in a Nestlé factory, and was taunted by local schoolchildren and punks as he walked home with sacks of chapati flour — beat him up after Sandhu insisted that the family watch “My Beautiful Laundrette” on TV. With nudity, gay sex, Pakistani businessmen cheating on their wives and a drug smuggler disguised as a mullah with heroin sewn into his fake beard, the film wasn’t just a wake-up call to white Britain; it also flew in the face of the traditional immigrant narrative. “Why are you showing us such filth?” Sandhu’s father asked him. “My father was right to be appalled,” Sandhu wrote. “The film celebrated precisely those things — irony, youth, family instability, sexual desire — that he most feared.” It taught his father, Sandhu added, “that he could not control the future. And control — over their wives, their children, their finances — was what Asian immigrants like him coveted.”

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When I posted about the new book “Marrying Anita” (Bloomsbury, July 2008) a few weeks ago, I was cynical about the arrival of yet another published work exploring the institution of arranged marriage. (So were many of you. Questions rolled in about author Anita Jain’s desire to find a “broadminded” husband in India and her impetus for writing the book. These were coupled with a heated conversation about dating in the desi community. You can see her answers to your questions and mine below the fold.)

Despite my pessimism at the time, I promised to give the book a chance. And, I’m glad I did. I expected “Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India” to be a straightforward chick lit read about a 33 year old woman who moves to India from the US in order to find a husband. “Oh great, she wrote a well-received New York magazine article and then decided to conduct one of those how-I-did-xyz-in-a-year experiments.” What I found instead was a candid, straightforward, and intelligent memoir that combines the author’s search for a kindred spirit with her experiences adjusting to life in contemporary (and middle class) India.

Jain’s move occurs during the summer of 2005, coincidentally perhaps, at the same point in her life when her father had moved to the US – at age 33. “I moved to India, reversing the migration pattern of my father,” she writes …

Historians will tell you Delhi has been home to nine distinct cities through the ages, the remnants of which are scattered everywhere, like seeds from a flower; a poet’s tom fifty paces from my front door, an old fort not far past the Sundar Nagar market. But I will tell you that there are ten cities of Delhi and I live in the last, one with restaurants where one can order mushroom-and-goat-cheese farfalle, use wireless broadband, and go to nightclubs where girls in spaghetti-strap tank tops gyrate to the latest hip-hop influenced Bollwood hit.

Comparing Anita Jain to Jane Austen might be too much of a stretch, but there is something of Austen’s spirit in Jain’s work which paints a vivid portrait of a particular generation of Indian middle class society. Her narrative is full of acute observations about economic and social changes, class relations, and the dating scene in India’s capital.

Jain does not “consider [herself] some kind of arbiter of dating.” In our email interview, she said, “I was simply one person who took a journey and wanted to write about it.” Indeed, while she is trying to figure out how to go about meeting the right person, she is also engaged in an equally (if not more fascinating) struggle to find an apartment (it’s tough to rent an apartment as a single woman in Delhi; not Mumbai or Bangalore, we learn) and to make new friends (one of her good friends ends up being the sister of a guy she met through shaadi.com back here in the US). Continue reading →

A recent story I read in the New York Times last week began with this anecdote about a trip to the airport that I know many of us can relate to:

Yasmine Hafiz was passing through security at an airport near Washington several weeks ago when a federal agent stopped her. Something strange and metallic had shown up in her carry-on bag during screening. Now she needed to explain what the suspicious object was.

At 18, newly graduated from high school, Yasmine knew the drill all too well. A few years earlier, an immigration officer had demanded she present a visa to board a flight from Canada to her home in Arizona. It was as if, because she had dark skin and a Pakistani surname and was Muslim, she, an American citizen, still needed permission to enter her own country.

This time, the security agent began unpacking the carry-on bag until he found his quarry. It was a bronze disc plated with gold. “It’s a medal,” said Yasmine’s mother, Dilara, who was traveling with her. “It’s from the president.”

Yasmine had received the medallion in the White House the day before, when she was honored as one of 139 Presidential Scholars.

This airport story is not one-of-a-kind – many of us have been through similar experiences in recent years. What it is resemblant of, however, is one of the challenges many South Asian-American students face – despite widespread success in various areas of student life, from math and science to athletics, South Asian high school and college students in the U.S. still face misconceptions about their culture, religion, and background, often at the most basic level. One graduating senior from high school in Arizona, Yasmine Hafiz, who is described in the Times article above, at only 18 years old, is working hard with her family to change misconceptions of Islam that are common in American schools, discussions and media. She and her family have written a book, the “American Muslim Teenager’s Handbook,” that aims to “bridge a cultural chasm” (NYT) by giving a clear and light explanation of the basic religious and cultural tenets of Islam for audiences of all ages. This book is an “easy-to-understand, nonproselytizing explanation” of Islam that has become a popular and moderate explanation of the religion among Jewish mothers and Episcopal schools in Arizona, as well as the ministry of education of Malaysia. Yasmine’s younger brother Imran, a sophomore, explains why his family has written the book: Continue reading →

I was talking to a Ph.D. student I work with, Colleen Clemens, about her experience working as a grader for the AP English exam. She had been assigned to work on a question about an Indian author, Anita Desai (the passage was from Fasting, Feasting), and she was shocked at how the students tended to use the passage as an excuse to throw out a series of flagrant generalizations about India and Indian culture. Incidentally, Colleen went with a group of first-year students to India last December, so she’s seen parts of the country herself. The following post, then, is a one-off essay by Colleen:

Recently, I served as a reader for the AP English exam. Imagine a room with 1500 college and high school teachers sitting on folding chairs (with no lumbar support) for eight hours a day, seven days straight, reading the almost one million essays written by nervous, twitchy high school students hoping to test out of their first-year college English course. In a stroke of luck and irony, I was assigned Question Two on this year’s exam, in which students were asked to read a passage from Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting and do a close reading to glean insight into Arun’s experience as “an exchange student.”

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My book tour is (mostly) over. But I wanted to share a little bit about what it was like in one of the most exciting spots I hit: Torino, Italy. I traveled there for four days in mid-May, for the Torino book festival, where I spent most of my time hanging out with Tahmima Anam, the author of A Golden Age.

Tahmima and I have the same fab Italian publisher, Garzanti, and the same fab editor, Elisabetta. Getting to know Tahmima was unexpected and awesome! She is one of the nicest and funniest people I met on tour—and she was also generous with her advice. I am reading her book now, and it’s fantastic. (Previous Sepia coverage here.) Anyway, she’s also a Sepia reader, and when I told her I wanted to blog about our time in Italy, she readily agreed.

We spent a fair amount of time giving interviews. As far as Tahmima and I could tell, there were four female South Asian authors at the Torino festival. It took hardly a moment before someone wanted all four of us in the same spot. Two of us wore saris. Nope, it was the other two.

Left to right: Tahmima Anam, Sunny Singh, Stefano Bortolussi, Selina Sen, and me.

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