Well, thanks to everyone for the lovely welcome, I’m very happy to be here—if a little nervous about suddenly bloggint to a large audience. My blog the lawyerwriter seems to generate a few hundred hits a day, which pretty much sums up my known friends, enemies, family and ex-boyfriends. From what I can tell, Sepia Mutiny gets about 16,000 hits a day. So this is a little like having a spotlight thrown on you while you’re singing in the bathub. You’re glad for the attention, of course, but you really wish you’d had a few more lessons to prepare yourself for the sudden publicity.
That said, I haven’t the foggiest idea of how to reach a wide audience, unless it’s to counsel them against going into law school simply because they’d seen too many episodes of Law & Order. See—already, I’ve lost half of you. Yes, my references are very American—I was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, raised in San Jose, CA, and have spent the last ten years in New York City. I am proudly a “Southie” and doubly proudly the cousin of Siva Vaidhyanathan, recently of The Daily Show fame.
It’s tempting to introduce myself by answering the Proust Questionnaire which is in the back pages of every issue of Vanity Fair magazine(who knew that David Brubeck hates his nose?), but perhaps who I am and what I’ve done will reveal itself better over the course of the blog. I tend to write about pop culture and media—I like to see how desi culture is represented in the West—particularly America—since, for most of my life, it wasn’t at all. I didn’t mind being the only brown girl in my kindergarten class—it was pretty fascinating to see what assumptions everyone had about me, and my culture. I am an attorney, but I use my legal expertise largely in a consulting fashion, if at all, or in my writings about law. I did not like the law firm life, and it certainly didn’t like me. In fact, given that I never saw my friends or my boyfriend of the time, I think the only people who were happy were my parents.
So under the rubrick of “desi,” I would be categorized, I think, as second generation South Indian-American, originally from Madras (never been to Chennai) heavily influenced by hippie Northern California culture and too much Manhattan nightlife. Most of the desi influences in my life are back in the Bay Area , (insert a shout out to the Almaden Valley posse here!), but I have a feeling that will change with this blog. I’m currently reading The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen, which discusses India’s long history of rationalism and intellectual debate. It’s encouraged me to approach this guest blogging experience a little differently than I approach the lawyerwriter. There I write what it is in my own head, just to flex my writing muscles. Here, I hope my writing reaches fellow oddballs in the desi community—and perhaps beyond.
Of course, all my writing is personal. It’s not that I’m particularly fascinating; it’s just that you really should write about what you know. If more people did that…actually, wait, I’m a ghostwriter. I’d never get a job again.
Never mind.
(thanks for the welcome)
