Work

FICTION

The Novel

I am currently seeking literary representation for my novel, Kaleidoscope Me, an autofictional reckoning with caste, inheritance, and the gift and debt of leaving home. It is a story that revolves and rearranges, its fragments resolving into new patterns with each turn.

"A rangy girl in a pleated school uniform, green belt with a metal buckle wound tight under her slight ribs, stands frozen in the unforgiving sun. She shields her eyes from the sides, instead of from above, elongating her field of vision into a vertical film strip, her fingers sprocket holes. The burning sun beams from above, through her and onto the ground. What do the shadows say? Each blink brings black, a burnt afterimage. She gazes into the blank white screen beneath her feet. Her thoughts rush away from the Delhi summer, her mind empty as the pit, her thoughts cool as imaginary ice. She wants to be elsewhere; she stares in a white pit that looks cold but is hot, looks clean but is toxic, looks endless but only because she uses her hands to blot out the world."

Short Stories

Currently under consideration at literary magazines.

TEACHING

I have taught at Georgetown, Stanford, NYU, the University of Chicago, and Parsons Paris, designing original courses on film, religion, postcolonialism, and climate change.

I've also spoken at venues including the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco and India's National Academy of Arts, on subjects ranging from gender to performance, to the Hindu diaspora and Bollywood.

A full academic and professional CV is available on request.

FILM & DIGITAL STORYTELLING

I trained as a filmmaker at Harvard and worked in the Mumbai film industry before directing and producing my own film about truck drivers. This documentary, Carriers, screened internationally and sold to European television.

I worked on Steve Buscemi's Lonesome Jim, starting as a production assistant and taking on third assistant director responsibilities, before beginning dissertation research in India. I filmed South Indian folk and ritual theatre while gathered archival and found footage. My doctoral research, a multimedia website retelling the Mahabharata, ranges from condensed television episodes to original film essays, and is now archived at Stanford University Libraries.

Clips available upon request.