Lokayukta Justice Santosh Hegde to Launch The Revised Kama Sutra

Press Release: Bangalore, Sept 4, 2010. Former Indian Supreme Court Justice and present Lokayukta Justice Santhosh Hegde, famous and well-loved for being a fearless crusader for integrity and against corruption in Indian public life, will be releasing the new HarperCollins edition of Richard Crasta’s novel “The Revised Kama Sutra” in Bangalore at Reliance Timeout, Cunningham Road, on June 9 at 6:30 pm. Richard Crasta's five other titles, which are almost impossible to find in Indian bookstores, will also be on sale at this Reliance Timeout branch.

(The following is partly from the HarperCollins press release)
The Revised Kama Sutra created waves when it was first published seventeen years ago, in December 1993, becoming a Viking Penguin bestseller, praised by reviewers as courageous, honest, fresh, and fascinating. Now hailed as a classic, Richard Crasta’s gloriously comic and poignant insight into naive Third World dreamers of the American Dream is a veritable guide to the Indian experience of childhood, puberty, sex, colonialism and yearnings not easily fulfilled, at least not in the original land of the Kama Sutra.

Vijay Prabhu is a small-town, middle-class Indian boy negotiating the pains and frustrations that come with growing up in a culture that celebrates the sterility of Jesuit schools and boys’ boarding houses and has Pillars of Oppression in place to nip in the bud any adolescent longings. To realize his destiny, both spiritual and sexual, Vijay embarks on a journey that will take him to the purported new land of the Kama Sutra—the land of free sex, greenbacks and Campbell’s Cream of Chicken Soup—the United States of America.

Khushwant Singh, writing in Outlook Magazine in 2006, included The Revised Kama Sutra in his list of the most unforgettable Indian novels of the previous 12 years.

About the Author
Richard Crasta grew up in Mangalore surrounded by nuns and nuts and has spent the years since then trying to recover from the experience. He joined the Indian Administrative Service, and then escaped to the US to nurture his profoundly uneducated soul at assorted schools including Columbia University. On a dark December night in New York, he wrote the first pages of his first novel, The Revised Kama Sutra, which was first published by Penguin India to considerable acclaim and later by many other publishers worldwide, and is now, thanks to HarperCollins India, returning to Indian bookstores after a 13-year absence (during part of which, the author had to struggle against discreet ayatollahs). He became a full-time writer and New York resident and went on to publish six other books, including the satirical and groundbreaking Impressing the Whites, the daring and comical What We All Need, and the searingly honest literary and publishing memoir The Killing of an Author. Richard Crasta, who founded the Invisible Man Press in New York, with the imprint Invisible Man Books, describes himself as a literary freedom fighter and anti-literary-apartheid activist who has been practicing the nonconformist, anti-colonialist style known as Writing While Brown. The Bangalore-born author, now a part-time Bangalore resident, is available for interviews. Contact rc@richardcrasta.com, or go to http://www.richardcrasta.com and click on "Contact".

TO MY FRIENDS & THE BOOK'S WELL-WISHERS: Please send a strong message to those who denied you of the book for so many years. Please come, tell your friends, and ask for the book at all the good bookstores, ask for it to be displayed. So that courageous writing and integrity are rewarded, even though we live in an atmosphere of corruption and compromise. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

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