Category
Music
Artists
Nisha Susan
Date
September 11th, 2022
The Women who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Other Stories – By Nisha Susan
Nisha Susan will be in conversation with Rahel Rao.
About Nisha Susan
Nisha Susan grew up in India, Nigeria and Oman and lives in Bangalore. She currently writes Cheap Thrills, a column on millennials, time and obsessions. She was the co-founder of the feminist platform, The Ladies Finger and the award-winning media company Grist Media. Her non-fiction is focused on culture, gender and politics. Her fiction explores the intimacy and strangeness the internet has brought to India. She is also the translator of KR Meera’s 2020 novel Qabar from Malayalam to English.
About ‘The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook & Other Stories’
From 1985 to 2015 Indians went from having to go to a public telephone exchange to make telephone calls to grannies arguing the merits of Skype vs FaceTime. This was my childhood, my teens and my early 20s. In a memorable span of 5 years my family acquiring a cordless phone to learning to sext. And in my 20s I had a disorienting year of international micro-fame because a Facebook campaign I started went viral. The unexpected stories of a country relishing and resisting globalisation, that is what I write about in fiction. A woman becomes obsessed with a dead woman’s online relics. A cook wonders whether her daughter’s cellphone is making her insane. Three dancers in the 1990s mastermind their sex lives over email in a conservative community. These short stories tap into the rich vein of love, violence and intimacy the Internet brought to the lives of Indian women.
Praise for The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook
Stylishly and intrepidly covering a range of human experiences, these stories announce a bracing new sensibility in Indian writing in English – Pankaj Mishra
Quirky, witty, thought-provoking, insightful – what else? What else does it have to be but a collection of stories about places and cultures I don’t know – and yet where I see myself. – Sara Paretsky
Who says Indians aren’t funny? These stories are little firecrackers. Nisha Susan writes about love and loss and that shitty thing called growing up and and learning to make art out of life. Read’em one at a time, your life will be a tiny bit better. – Mohammed Hanif
Nisha Susan’s unusual anti-romantic stories break your expectations of form, narration and content. They are striking illustrations of millennial women, presented with a rawness, truthfulness and integrity that tells the reader, this is what it is, take us as we are. – KR Meera