Richard Crasta, Author

What I present to you is two stories. One is of a simple Indian soldier from a village near Mangalore, one who, according to his brother Louis, "never got into a fight with anybody"--finding himself in the most brutal war in history, World War II, and being taken prisoner by a fellow Asian army--the Japanese Army, which treats thousands of Indian prisoners with a  brutality that results in higher mortality rates for them than for POWs of the Nazis. And then, after a miraculous survival, comes home to write his story, which is forgotten, perhaps scorned by his feudal superiors. The second story is of a son discovering his father's story even as his father is 86 years old, and feeble enough as to leave the world at anytime--and being so moved by it as to be compelled to publish it and to give it to the world.  It is a story about fathers and sons, part of the universal story that will never end, and will never cease to have fascination (incidentally, there ...

It was at a New Year's Party in Mangalore, possibly in 1999, or at the turn of the Millennium, that a relative who had read my book (and there are very few of those--my relatives are mostly non-readers) approached me and asked me, "Where did you find the courage?" He had just read a recent book of mine. Later, I would be told by another reader and passionate fan who searched me out and found me, "I never knew books such as this could be published!" Well, my friends and well-wishers, it's getting harder, because of certain choices I made, to be an independent publisher, have exhausted me financially, and because it's not enough to publish a book, as an independent; you have to market it, and the algorithm gods have to favor you, or your book's existence will not even be known. A few of my books were pure joy to write (though hard work to edit--I sometimes edit a book as many as 30 times). For example: Jesus and Pals Explain Their Daddy Issues a...

It surprises me now, to think about it: how huge a role John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy (more the former than the latter, who visited India) played in India in the 1960s. Most Indians had very few role models, and very little access to international media. Our own media was very undeveloped, our only stars were Gandhi and Nehru. Thus, John F. Kennedy, whose death drew banner headlines in Indian newspapers, completely pushing out other news from Page 1, also plays a part in my novel The Revised Kama Sutra, and so, surprisingly, does Jackie--who plays a bigger part (a fiction within the novel). I'm still absolutely stunned by Oliver Stone's JFK, and believe that the killing of JFK was an inside job ... meaning, possibly, the Mafia under secret directions from someone powerful inside the government. A pity we may never know the real truth. Of course, to describe my novel as an "Indian" novel is only around 90% correct. A bit more than two significant chapters a...

My late father, born into a poor family, walked to school through tiger-infested jungles and completed his high school at St. Aloysius College High School, Mangalore. He said he was, a couple of times, kicked out of class for being late with his school fees. Joining the British Indian Army and being taken prisoner in Singapore by the Japanese, my father underwent 3 1/2 years of horrific captivity in Rabaul, New Britain (now part of Papua New Guinea), during which time his mother had no news of him and thought he might be dead. Back in India, almost as an act of therapeutic release, this high-school educated man, with little exposure to literature, wrote down his story on the letter-pad stationery of his brothers' footwear shop. He wrote it in pencil, in 1946, and the manuscript lay unattended for 50 years until I read it and decided it had to be published. It was presented to him on December 27, 1997, less than two years before his death. I give below an excerpt from his memo...