Richard Crasta

Richard Crasta ( (Devanagari)) is an Indian American writer and novelist.

He grew up in Mangalore, lived in the United States for twenty years, mostly in the New York metropolitan area, and now spends much of his time in Asia. His works include the comic and frankly sexual coming of age novel, The Revised Kama Sutra (published in seven languages and ten countries to date), and fiction and nonfiction books such as Impressing the Whites: The New International Slavery; Beauty Queens, Children and the Death of Sex; the semi-fictional What We All Need; and The Killing of an Author.

Early life and education

Richard Crasta, son of the late John Baptist Crasta and Christine Crasta (née D'Souza), was born in Bangalore, India. He had two brothers and a sister.

Richard had a strict middle-class Catholic upbringing and grew up in Mangalore in the 1960s and early 1970s. He began writing when he was ten.

An important factor in his development was the church and the convent school to which he was sent as a boy, and the secondary school of his adolescence.

He completed his Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Economics, History and Political Science from the University of Mysore in 1972.

Career Crasta began his novel The Revised Kamasutra: A Novel of Colonialism and Desire while taking courses at Columbia University. After more than eight years of work, The Revised Kamasutra appeared in India in 1993. Subsequent editions appeared in Britain, the United States, Germany, Italy, and a few other countries.

In 2000, he published Impressing the Whites. Five years later, he published two other books, What We All Need, entirely his own, and Fathers, Rebels and Dreamers, compiled with two of his Mangalorean friends Arunachalam Kumar, conservationist, and Ralph Nazareth, poet and professor. In 2008, he published The Killing of an Author, a literary and publishing autobiography and critique of the publishing industry.

Philosophical views Ideologically, Crasta describes himself as "a profound, all-round sceptic whose religion is literature, laughter, and love".

Works

The Revised Kamasutra: A Novel of Colonialism and Desire (1993) Beauty Queens, Children and the Death of Sex (1997) Impressing the Whites: The New International Slavery (2000) One little Indian (2003) What We All Need: An Anti-Terrorist Book of Incompletions, Unsafe Love, and Writing While Brown (2005) Fathers, Rebels and Dreamers (editor and co-author, along with Ralph Nazareth and Arunachalam Kumar) (2005) The Killing of an Author: Jackie Kennedy, Sonny Pfizer, Seven Little Ayatollahs and a Suicide Pact (2008) I Will NOT Go the F**k to Sleep (2011)

Footnotes