Richard Crasta, Author

Sixty-seven years after India's independence from Britain, the freedom of Indians has suffered ... and often, at the hands of Indians themselves, even though a few of these suppressors work for foreign-owned corporations. For me, 1993 and 1994 represented the height of Indian independence. March 1993 was when Penguin India's David Davidar accepted my novel, The Revised Kama Sutra ; in early 1994, it was enthusiastically welcomed by most of the media, despite using language and daring that had not been seen before in any book published in India, in any language--possibly since the original Kama Sutra itself, which is completely clinical and unembarrassed about sex. In 2000, Impressing the Whites received considerable attention from the media--and considerable sales--at least the Indian press and public's first reactions were free and unfettered and welcoming. And then, the Indian Ayatollahs, political correctness, and the godfathers went to work, suppressing their own auth...

When a young Indian named Mohandas Gandhi went to South Africa as a fortune-hunting lawyer, he, thanks to an inbuilt sense of fairness and justice, refused to back down when slapped on the face with an unfair law: “No blacks and Indians allowed in First Class railway compartments.” The incident changed his life. A rising yuppie lawyer, he was transformed into a freedom fighter heedless of his personal wealth, and interested purely in battling injustice and gaining freedom for oppressed people. I, who am no saint in most aspects of my life, did, over a longer period, come to a certain discovery that changed my literary career and perhaps my life.  I came to America to study and for the freedom to be who I really was.  American universities were spacious, generous, and open-minded. Until I arrived in America, I did not know how to distinguish between good literature and trash; I had read very few of the great works. In America, at two different universities, one of wh...