Odds and Ends

I give a quick run-down of thoughts on pieces I’ve written.

Money Talks: The special interests of Shalabh Kumar, Trump’s favourite Indian American

In this piece for The Caravan, I investigate Shalabh Kumar’s extensive history of political contributions (both financial and in-kind) to the Republican Party and BJP.

Kumar is a fascinating figure, in many ways larger than life. A 10k-word piece could have easily been written just on his eccentricities. Kumar’s has been involved with so many different developments in the last ten years, that the intrigue of the piece alone excited me. Still, I’m glad I could use Kumar to talk about a lot of issues bigger than the man himself: the trade war, botched immigration policy, campaign finance deregulation, the thick web of connections tying conservative NRIs to BJP politics, and the stunning flouting of ethics guidelines that characterizes the DC “swamp.”

Race to the Top: The racial opportunism of a rising political star in Trump’s America

In this piece for The Caravan, I investigate Nikki Haley’s strategic use of ethnic identity to become a major figure in the Republican Party. I also situate her rise to power within the broader context of US racial politics.

Nikki Haley had long been a subject of great interest to me due to certain parallels: she and I both spent formative years of our adolescence in rural, conservative towns to first-generation immigrants. Moreover, her meteoric rise to power remains truly remarkable. She is the first woman of color to become governor (a distinction she shares with Susana Martinez, who also became governor in 2011). I found myself questioning how she has managed to succeed in such political tumult. This piece was born from that curiosity.

Why Attack on Titan is the Alt-Right’s Favorite Manga

In this piece for The New Republic, I discuss the popular manga Attack on Titan, and the neo-Nazi fanbase it has accumulated.

I like Attack on Titan. The point of the article, in my opinion, is that authorial intent is tricky, and declaring a piece of media “woke” or “not woke” is complicated. I tried to write a meditation on death of the author in the time of chan-boards, with Attack on Titan as a case study. Nazis think it’s Nazi propaganda. Isayama thinks it’s a personal story. I think it is, or at least it could be, a revolution of the once-colonized and a story that asks the difficult questions about repair.

Can the Left Win YouTube?

In this piece for The New Republic, I profile a popular cohort of left-wing content creators on YouTube.

I had been an obsessive fan of LeftTube for about 12 months before the piece ran: not its earliest days by any means, but before its creators really broke into the mainstream. I felt mild frustration that most media outlets had covered Natalie Wynn’s content from the angle of deradicalization, while largely ignoring her other content and the fascinating ecosystem to which she belonged. The hardest part of this piece was narrowing it down to just six creators to profile. I chose six of the most different people I could, to gesture at the vastness of the world. I hope I succeeded, though I will never live down the botched wording decision that implied that YouTuber Shaun is a skull.

The Sprawling, Empathetic Adventure of Saga

In this piece for The Atlantic, I review the groundbreaking representation and political content in the blockbuster graphic novel Saga.

When I read Saga for the first time, I thought it was a series that should be mandatory reading for scholars of identity politics, asylum claims, and political violence. I also thought that it should be mandatory reading for people who believed comics cannot tell stories with all the nuance of literary novel. I found Staples and Vaughan’s work to be arresting and important. I wrote this essay to try to say why.

Making Fun of How South Asians Talk: A History

In this piece for The Atlantic, I talk about the history of the infamous “Apu accent.” While few South Asians enjoy hearing white people use the accent, there’s greater diversity in attitudes towards it than one might suspect.

The piece was unsurprisingly inspired by Hari Kondabolu’s documentary The Problem with Apu. I’ve been a big fan of Kondabolu’s comedy for years, and his own discomfort with the accent has been a lightning rod. I wanted to add a slightly more academic flair to his work, but I also wanted to push it a bit to explore nuances of attitudes within the Indian American community.

The Dark Side of the Comics that Redefined Hinduism

In this piece for The Atlantic, I talk about the casteism, racism, and sexism implicit in the storylines and illustrations of beloved comic book series Amar Chitra Katha.

Full disclosure: As a child, I loved Amar Chitra Katha and its siblings: Panchatantra, Jataka Tales, Akbar & Birbal, Vikram & Betal, the list goes on. I did not want to bash fans of the comics, or even to say that the Thing was Bad. ACK has a complex legacy, and I wanted to draw attention to some of its more toxic messages. Because these comics sit so closely to many Indians’ hearts, this piece received the strongest backlash of any piece that I’ve written. In many ways, I wrote this piece for the fans who have grown up. We aren’t children anymore, and we get to decide how to tell the stories we love to our own children and grandchildren.