After a long, hard year, the Festival of Lights is a welcome reset — After an exhausting year dominated by a pandemic and an equally tiring election cycle rife with racist and xenophobic attacks, a weekend of new beginnings and celebration feels overdue. Enter Diwali. Also known in the West as the Festival of Lights, this celebration will be observed this year by millions…

South Asian Americans make up around 2% of the American population and comprise an even smaller percent of registered voters in the United States. But you wouldn’t know it from the outsized effort candidates made to target the desi vote this election cycle. For the first time in United States…

Some are proud. Some are not. Here’s how identity politics play out. — The day after Kamala Harris was named Joe Biden’s pick as his running mate in the 2020 election, Ankit Jain of Washington, D.C., awoke to an email from his South Asian American family members titled, “Fwd: Kamala Harris — Indian Heritage.” A video of Harris making dosas with Mindy Kaling…

No one wants to talk about it, but it’s all there — My roommates in Rome, co-workers in Washington, D.C., and friends in New Delhi all have something to say about Netflix’s new reality series, which pulls back the curtain on a facet of arranged marriages in India and the South Asian diaspora, matchmaking. For the few who have managed to miss…

Wake up. The caste system is alive and well, and here’s how to dismantle it. — Growing up as a Brown girl in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, people were as likely to think I was Native American or Mexican as they were to guess that I was Indian. Once I clarified that I was Indian American, rather than American Indian, two of the most common questions I…

Harry Potter had us in the back. Now we are front and center. — I spent most of my childhood years completely and truly convinced that one day Warner Brothers producers would show up on my doorstep to cast me as Parvati or Padma Patil in the Harry Potter movies. At the time, my younger sister looked like my twin, and we happened to…

More culture. Less capitalism. — Growing up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where being Indian was so rare that my classmates were more likely to think I was Native American than South Asian, Indian clothes were brought out only once a year — like how I imagined our White neighbors would bring out their nice china…