Anar Ali (Toronto, Canada)
Baby Khaki's Wings

Baby Khaki's Wings by Anar Ali is a collection of richly imagined tales, by turns playful and dark, and shot through with magic. These stories depict the lives of East African Ismailis, a Muslim community with origins in India and a history of upheaval and dislocation. In the title story, a luckless ayah is forced to take extraordinary measures when a baby under her care is born with wings.

Siddharth Shangvi (Bombay, India & San Francisco, CA)
The Last Song of Dusk

When the gorgeous Anuradha weds Vardhmaan, a young doctor, their life together portends wonderful things. But tragedy soon transforms their marriage. Moving into an old villa by the sea, they are joined by Nandini, a dazzling and devious artist who comes to live with them. Lauded worldwide for its wit and for the author's fresh, sensual, and exuberant use of language, this is a story of love, fate, and family that will touch your heart like a beloved song.

Literature Curator

Bhargavi C. Mandava (Literature Curator) was born in Hyderabad, India and grew up in New York City. Her novel, Where the Oceans Meet, was published in 1996 by Seal Press and has since been published in Dutch and Catalan.

Her poetry has been anthologized in the collections Through a Child's Eyes, Poems and Stories About War and Another Way to Dance, Contemporary Asian Poetry from Canada and the United States. Bhargavi's essays appear in Young Wives' Tales, Body Outlaws and Listen Up, Voices from the Next Feminist Generation.

All three anthologies are being utilized in women's studies programs at numerous universities. In 1997, she was a recipient of a Brody Arts Fund Fellowship in fiction. Recently, her short story Wine Boy was published in the Konundrum Engine Literary Review. She is presently completing her next novel and a story collection.

Mythili Prakash (Los Angeles, CA)

Inspired by Anoushka Shankar's musical score entitled Mahadeva, this dance explores space, time, and movement through the dynamics of Shiva's Tandava: His timeless five-fold dance of creation, destruction, recreation, preservation and grace manifested through our human cycle of birth, death, rebirth, sustenance, and nirvana. Through the power and vigor of the magnificent dance form Bharata Natyam, choreographer Mythili Prakash explores eternal relevance of Shiva's dance in our human existence.

Parijat Desai Dance Company (New York, NY)

A blend of dance, yoga and martial arts, Quiet/Fire, explores the nature and purpose of a warrior. Drawing on the narrative aspect of Bharata Natyam, as well as its climatic rhythmic compositions known as jatis, the piece follows a group of warriors-in-training who battle both externally and internally. Whether they are telling the tale of a warrior or moving sculpture out into space, Desai and company challenge the boundaries of nation, asking what's possible.

Dance Curators

Anu Ganpati received her MA in Dance Ethnology from the Department of World Arts and Cultures, UCLA. She has worked in the programming department of Asia Society, Southern California Center. An activist who is dedicated to peace and appreciation through music, movement and the written word, she is a writer for the India Post newspaper and has been published by India Currents Magazine. She recently collaborated with her mother on India: An Illustrated History, published by Hippocrene Illustrated Histories in 2003.

Amita Sheth has studied Bharata Naytam (as a disciple of Ramya Harishankar), Modern, and Ballet. She holds a BA in Worlds Arts & Cultures and Polical Science from UCLA. Currently, she is dancing with the Arpana Dance Company and teaches Bharata Natyam at the Ektaa Center in Orange County.