I write children’s stories, short stories and poems. I translate wisdom literature from ancient India. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area with my wife and daughter, and I work at Google as a product manager. You can follow me on Twitter.
My short story, A Brief History of the Free to Love Campaign, on love, politics and identity was published in The Caravan, India’s first long-form narrative journalism magazine. After I finished the story, I embarked on my next grand journey: write the Great Indian Novel. And then...then my daughter arrived. While I heroically managed to read War & Peace and Anna Karenina on my iPad while putting her to sleep (yes, she took a long time to fall asleep, hence Tolstoy), my literary output was the exact opposite of Tolstoy’s. It was zero.
When we began to read to our daughter, I discovered new favorites in children’s literature: greats like Julia Donaldson, Arnold Lobel, and Kate DeCamillo. I was inspired to write children’s stories and now I have finished three. One on a baking competition, the second a story of friendship and parting, and the third an environmental fable that doubles up as a father-daughter story. I’m currently querying agents and looking for publishers for these stories.
I’m married to an avid Janeite who introduced me to the wonderful world of Jane Austen. I gave a presentation at the Northern California chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) on a Tamil movie adaptation of Sense & Sensibility. Only one thing has earned me more brownie points at home, and that is the first gift I gave her while we were dating: a DVD set of the classic 1995 BBC production of Pride & Prejudice starring Colin Firth. Once I tried reading her other favorite author Edith Wharton, but I ended up depressed for a week having read the harrowing Ethan Frome.
At home, while I’m not discussing the works of Austen or George Eliot or Virginia Woolf, or reading Elephant & Piggie or Fancy Nancy, I enjoy reading Vikram Seth, V. K. N., Emily Dickinson, Jorge Luis Borges, Shakespeare, W. B. Yeats, The Mahabharata, Calvin & Hobbes, and P. G. Wodehouse. And of course, Tolstoy, for he reminds me of all the hours I’ve spent in life putting my daughter to sleep.
Daily Dharma is a collection of translations of poetic sayings from ancient India. In Sanskrit, each saying is called a “subhashita”, which means, unsurprisingly, “a good saying”. They are epigrams, bites of down-to-earth wisdom and come from a diverse set of sources. To name a few: the great epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, the Upanishads, the wise collections of tales Panchatantra and Hitopadesha, works on ethics such as Bhartrihari’s Nitishataka, and political tracts such as Chanakya’s Chanakya Niti.
The goal of the Daily Dharma project is to translate this ancient practical wisdom into enjoyable verse in everyday English. The original epigrams are themselves short poems with a meter, some rhyme and much wordplay. In these translations, I attempt to capture some of that "word music" to the extent I can, in addition to, of course, capturing their meaning as accurately as I can.
I’ve relied on many great sources that offer commentary on these poems. In particular, I’m grateful for Mohan Chandra Joshi’s labor of love Sanskrit Subhashitas, the superb Sanskrit Pearls by Rashmi Kashi, and the informative blog written by Usha Sanka.
Lasting gratitude is due to my family and my Sanskrit teachers in school. They created a childhood and boyhood environment for me that was suffused with the ancient language and the sometimes cynical, often witty, always insightful works of writers who wrote in that language.