KPFA Radio 94.1FM presents:
Tuesday, March 22, 2016 7:30 PM
St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Avenue, Berkeley
Advance tickets: $12 : brownpapertickets.com :: T: 800-838-3006
or Books Inc, Pegasus (3 sites), Moe’s, Walden Pond Bookstore, Diesel a Bookstore, Mrs. Dalloway’s
S.F. – Modern Times
$15 door
Somini Sengupta emigrated from Calcutta as a child in 1975 and grew up in California. Returning thirty years later to India as the first Indian-American bureau chief for The New York Times, she found a vastly different country: one defined as much by aspiration—at least by its illusion—as by the strictures of sea and caste. The End of Karma explores this new India through the eyes of young people from different worlds: a Maoist rebel; a woman killed because she married the “wrong” man; a teenage girl who needles her father to let her become a police officer. Driven by aspiration, thwarted by state and society, the young are making new demands on India’s democracy for equality of opportunity, dignity for girls, and civil liberties. Sengupta dramatically spotlights these stories of ordinary men and women, weaving together a groundbreaking portrait of a land – one of the planet’s largest – in turmoil.
“The End of Karma is the essential beginning for any reader who wants to under- stand the future of the world’s biggest democracy. With meticulously researched, grippingly told stories about youth in today’s India, Sengupta’s quest to understand her daughter’s birthplace seized me like no other book coming from that country today.”
– Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
Somini Sengupta is a veteran foreign correpondent for The New York Times, and winner of the prestigious 2003 George Polk Award for foreign reporting. She lives in New York City
Professor Vijaya Nagarajan teaches in the Dept. of Religious Studies and Program in Environmental Studies at the University of San Francisco. She teaches courses on Hinduism, Religion and Environment, Voice, Memory and Landscape: Spiritual Autobiographies, and Commons: Land, Water and Air. Her scholarship has centered on the Kolam, a women’s ritual art in southern India. She is currently finishing the book, Feeding a Thousand Souls: Women, Ritual and Art in southern India—The Kolam (Oxford University Press). Her other research projects include: On the Languages of the Commons; Tree Temples, Mangroves and Temple Forests. She has been active in the American Academy of Religion, in the environmental movement in India and the United States, and has been co-director of the Institute for the Study of Natural and Cultural Resources and the Recovery of the Commons Project.
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