I am an award-winning Paris-based author, born in the United States to an immigrant father from India and a third-generation Danish-American mother. I have navigated between different identities my whole life. As a four-year-old, I asked my mother: “Which way am I half? Up and down? Or sideways?” I am still trying to find the answer to this question, one I have examined in four books: Motiba’s Tattoos, published by Public Affairs; Planet India, published by Scribner; India in the 21st Century, published by Oxford University Press; and 80 mots de l’Inde, published by L’Asiathèque in Paris. My books have been translated and published in over a dozen languages, including in French by Actes Sud.
I have also published scores of articles on a wide variety of topics in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Caravan in India, Le Monde Diplomatique and Courrier International in France, and more. I write and publish in both English and French. In 2013, when The New York Times put their name on the International Herald Tribune, I, an American India expert living in Paris and a longtime Senior Fellow at the now-closed World Policy Institute at The New School in New York, was hired to join the Editorial Board to write on international affairs. I did so until 2018.
Née d’un père indien élevé entre la Birmanie et le Gujarat et d’une mère américaine d’origine danoise qui a grandi sur une ferme dans l’Orégon, j’ai navigué entre les pays et les identités toute ma vie. A l’âge de quatre ans, elle a demandé à sa mère : « Je suis moitié-moitié dans quel sens, vertical ou horizontal ? » Elle est toujours à la recherche de la réponse à cette question.
Je suis l’auteure de quatre livres sur l’Inde, dont en français Planet India: l’ascension turbulente d’un géant démocratique (Actes Sud) et 80 mots de l’Inde (L’Asiathèque), et de maintes essais et tribunes, an anglais et en français.
