Richard Crasta, Author

For most of us, who have not enough time on our hands, the most expensive thing is time. Whereas money comes and goes, and can return in much larger quantities, time, once spent, can never be repurchased at any price. I have been thinking about what is the fair pricing for a book--from a writer's viewpoint, and a reader's viewpoint. Because fair pricing cannot be separated, in this case, from cost, and value. And when I use the word "price" below, it is sometimes shorthand to mean cost or value, and to include both the monetary and non-monetary component, unless it is obviously otherwise. From a writer's viewpoint: of course, any true writer writes because he/she must, because of a compulsion that goes far beyond financial logic; but in a money-based economic system, his work should ideally fetch him/her at least a U.S. postal clerk's salary for the years of life he exchanged for writing that book (in my case, 8 years for The Revised Kama Sutra and 1-2 ye...

Excerpts from I Will Not Go the F**k to Sleep (daddies & kids, multifaceted book of humor and satire)  I: From "What You Don't Know about Bangaloring" (satire on outsourcing) Dear Brothers and Sisters of the Great Hamburger Cowboy Nation of America: There is no need to introduce myself. You know me and my entire family already. Because my eighteen brothers and sisters, bred and currently breeding like rabbits in Bangalore, have all taken your jobs (alternative pronunciation: yer jaorbs?). What’s more, you have spoken to one or more of us. Remember Sue (Sushmita) at AT&T, Kelli (Kalyani) at Walmart Customer Service, Billy (Balwant) from AOL, Jake (Jayakrishnan) from Citibank Visa, Victor (Vikas) from Microsoft Tech Support, Neil (Neelakanta) from HP Customer Support, Vicki (Vikram Bandit) from Citibank Credit Default Swap Investments, John S. Warren (Jnaneswaran) of the Legal Support Hotline, Biff (Bhimaiah, wow, that was a ...

From The Killing of an Author:    As a matter of principle, it is important to preserve uncompromising writers like me, because as Tom Hayden says in How to Save the World (a quote I picked up on the Internet): “You can’t break the cycle of poverty; you can’t break the cycle of violence; you can’t break the cycle of corporate expansion; you can’t break the cycle of the arms race; you can’t break the cycle of imprisonment, if you don’t break the cycle by which radicals are isolated, idealists are turned into pragmatists, and pragmatists into opportunists.” Isolated, fatwahed, starved, and broken. Yes, you need to protect the writers who would, as Bill Clinton said of Bob Dylan, disturb the peace and discomfort the powerful. The Killing of an Author also contains this appeal to Sonny Mehta, President of Knopf, who had praised my novel "The Revised Kama Sutra" in glowing terms, and according to Harriet Wasserman, had offered to publish it, an...

THE REVISED KAMA SUTRA has been published in 10 countries and was called "very funny" by Kurt Vonnegut. It is a big book, and many of the most energetic and exuberant passages occur after the first 50 to 70 pages. In this passage, Vijay, the protagonist, is around 16 years old and has just made his first (unsuccessful) attempt to lose his cherry with a hooker: Chapter 10 How to Succeed -o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o- The confession had taken place on the very evening of the afternoon in which I had failed to unburden myself of my cherry. Heavy-handed Catholicism had captured and nailed down my sinning frame with Inquisitional power; within an hour, I had rushed to Jeppoo Church, a Portuguese-style structure coated with dark green moss and peeling yellow paint. Choosing the oldest and, I hoped, the deafest priest in this saint-rich church, I had confessed, shyly and mumblingly, my inept sin. It was 1969, the year Neil Arm...

The Revised Kama Sutra: A Novel, published in 10 countries and 15 editions (the titles vary a little bit), and called "very funny" by Kurt Vonnegut, is my biggest and most complete novel so far. I am working on other books that I think could be as powerful, but need time, space, and a bit of monetary support to complete them. it is hard to really encapsulate a 125,000 word novel in a few words, but here is an arbitrary sampler for those who are new to it. REVIEWS: "Any book that can force me, against my will, to guffaw out loud while reading it in public places is to be treasured. "The Revised Kama Sutra" was as rife with inventive comic imagery as "A Confederacy of Dunces," as insightful and subtly searing as "Catcher in the Rye," and as sensuous as the Kama Sutra itself. Although I've never been to India, I felt I experienced the lively streets, people, colors, aromas, shapes and sounds of the cities mentioned in the ...

Partly from I Will Not Go the F to Sleep: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0053GBUYG Consider these two limericks: There was a young man of Calcutta Who had a terrible sttttt-tutter He is reported to have said Please pass me some bbbbbb-bread And also some bbbbbb-butter! There was a young man of Ghent Who had a penis so long it bent. It was so much trouble. That he kept it double. And instead of coming, he went. Almost no one these days will narrate these limericks in mixed company (and by mixed company, I don’t necessarily mean the two major sexes). Because both of these unfortunate young men are Persons with Disabilities—one has a speech impediment, and the second has a medical condition (Peyronies’ Disease? Acute Pathological Perverse Clintonitis?) that might result in—please pass the tissues—his not having babies or being able to lead a normal love life, the poor thing. He needs advanced and expensive plastic surger...

SJohn Baptist Crasta, 1910-1999, is the father of Richard Crasta, the author of eight books. He was born in Kinnigoli, and walked barefoot for 20 miles through tiger-infested jungles to join his high school in Mangalore. Miraculously escaping an earthquake at Quetta, he joined the British Indian Army, and was captured by the Japanese. His memoir of being a Prisoner-of-War of the Japanese during World War II was published by his son, who edited the book and added an introduction and three essays to it. The book was originally launched on December 27, 1997, and later in 1999 (second edition), is now published in a new edition on Smashwords and at Amazon.  At the time that it happened, John Baptist Crasta was the oldest Indian to have his first book published: he was 87 years old when it happened, and the manuscript had lain in his steel trunk for 51 years after he wrote it. And this is the short biographical introduction that appears in EATEN BY THE JAPANESE: THE MEMOI...