Aatish Taseer + Krithika Varagur: A Return to Self

Join us for an in-person event with acclaimed author Aatish Taseer for the launch of his new book A Return to Self. Joining Aatish in conversation is acclaimed writer and editor Krithika Varagur. This event will be hosted at The Strand at Columbus Ave at 450 Columbus Ave.

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A blend of travelog and memoir spanning from Turkey to Mexico, exploring Aatish Taseer’s uniquely blended identity and asking: Why do certain cities become epicenters of great historical shifts and sites of unpredictable communities.

In 2019, the government of Prime Minister Narenda Modi revoked Aatish Taseer’s Indian citizenship, thereby exiling him from the country where he grew up and lived for thirty years. This loss, both practical and spiritual, sent him on a journey of revisiting the places that formed his identity, and asking broader questions about the complex forces that make a culture and a nationality, in the process.

In Istanbul, he confronts the hopes and ambitions of his former self. In Uzbekistan, he sees how what was once the majestic portal of the Silk Road is now a tourist façade. In India, he explores why Buddhism, which originated there, is so little practiced. Everywhere he goes, the ancient world mixes intimately with the contemporary: with the influences of the pandemic, the rise of new food cultures, and the ongoing cultural battles of regions around the world. How do centuries of cultures evolving and overlapping, often violently, shape the people that subsequently emerge from them?

In thoughtful prose that combines reportage with romanticism, Taseer casts an incisive eye at what it means to belong to a place that becomes an unstable, politicized vessel for ideas defined by exclusion and prejudice, and gets to the human heart of the shifts and migrations that define our multicultural world.

Photo credit: Ryan Davis

AATISH TASEER is the author of the memoir Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands and the acclaimed novels The Way Things Were, a finalist for the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize, The Temple-Goers, short-listed for the Costa First Novel Award, and Noon; and the memoir and travelog The Twice-Born. He is also the translator of a volume of Saadat Hasan Manto’s short stories from Urdu, Manto: Selected Stories. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is a Writer at Large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Born in England and raised in New Delhi, educated in the US and previously a journalist in the UK, he now lives in New York.

Krithika Varagur is a writer and editor in New York. Her work has appeared in outlets including Harper’s, the London Review of Books, and The New York Times, and received prizes from the Silvers-Dudley Foundation, the Overseas Press Club, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, and more. She has been an editor at The Drift magazine since it launched in 2020, as well as a National Geographic Explorer, a speechwriter, and an Amtrak writer-in-residence.

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