Richard Crasta, Author

No, not me. My name is not Khan, and I do occasionally terrorize ants . . . I think. You'd have to ask the ants, because I haven't had positive confirmation of this suspicion, but I imagine that seeing a giant like me try to wipe out a few dozen of them with the help of a tissue . . . how could that not be terror? The reason I titled this post "My Name is Khan, and I am Not a Terrorist," is that I have just returned from seeing the movie My Name is Khan --and, exiting the movie, I greeted the cinema's manager and shook his hands while saying to him, "My Name is Khan, and I am Not a Terrorist." The movie was liberating to me as a few other movies have been-- Django Unchained is a recent one, but there have been a few others that are better--and I believe that it ought to be seen by every American, and every person in the West. I believe it ought to be compulsory viewing, just as the Declaration of Independence and at least one Shakespeare play are co...

"When I moved from Holland to where I live now, in Asia, I shipped a container containing all of my books. Because my books, even the ones I have already read, are a part of me. I have to have them with me wherever I go." So said a Dutch expatriate to me the other day. He added that he sometimes rereads his old books, and truly enjoys doing that. For 17 years, in New York, I had added to my steadily growing collection of books, which rose from around 40 to around 2,000 through four changes of residence, often traveling long distances to buy books at library sales, garage sales, and book sales. I hadn't read three-fourths of these books, but they were all in my “To Read or Browse Through” category. They were my companions, pieces of me, and they were spread out in the various rooms of the last proper home that I lived in. Easily accessible, half of them displayed spine-out on mostly tall bookshelves, they were constant sources of consolation, inspiration, pleasure,...

No Sex Please, You Are Indians! is the ironic title of my partly humorous book, a collection of 4 long essays (including one interview) just published on Amazon Kindle, and a fifth essay (an excerpt from a different book) which explains the title. All of these essays (but the fifth one) are from my controversial second book, Beauty Queens, Children and the Death of Sex, which was published by HarperCollins India in 1997. It and similar free-spirited books, coming from an Id, from a character rather than from me, are published under the pseudonym, Vijay Prabhu. Why the title No Sex Please, You are Indians ? What was the controversy about Beauty Queens, Children, and the Death of Sex ? Why was the book restricted in distribution? You will have to discover the answer for yourself by reading the book--well, the full book is not yet published as an e-book (it's a project I'll soon get down to), but meanwhile, this short book collects four of the most controversial chapters re...

These few paperbacks of mine have been published on Createspace and are also available more conveniently from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.You may save a few days by ordering from Amazon, but if you're not in a hurry, the author gets a slightly higher royalty for books ordered directly from Createspace.   Createspace is a Print-on-Demand service. If you order one copy, they print just that one copy for you, and then ship it to you. As the overheads are higher for producing a single copy, the books cost a couple of dollars more than mass-printed ones (in addition to which, Createspace makes a profit on each printing, following which Amazon or other distributors take their cut for selling the book); but for an author with small means, Print on Demand is better than having no paperback book available at all.  To order these books from Amazon: I Will Not Go the F**k to Sleep (paperback) : http://www.amazon.com/Will-NOT-Go-Sleep/dp/1466480173/ (This and the next book: th...

I was just going through "The Killing of an Author," one of the three books of my Freedom Trilogy, and one that often delights me when I reread it, and came upon this Footnote, which made me smile and I must, really must share this with my few readers (there are actually many such passages in this book and in "Impressing the Whites", but this struck me as a wee bit more exuberant--and non-pc-- than the rest): 1.      Why Rushdie, with his literary eminence and wealth, would want to do something so prosaic and academic and policeman-like as edit an anthology of Indian literature and function as doorkeeper, chowkidar, or San Pedro to the gates of his own profession, his own country as it were, beats me. Perhaps it is that Rushdie, even though he has one of the world’s biggest pies all to himself, more pie than he, his wives, his mistresses, their ex-boy friends, and all of their children put together could ever eat, still wants to poke his finger into ever...