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With a view to providing authors, playwrights and film professionals from the South Asia an opportunity to interact with their audience in the greater Washington DC area, Network of South Asian Professionals of Washington DC together with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program organized the South Asian Literary and Theater Arts Festival (SALTAF) at National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. recently

            The two-day festival, which could attract hundreds of lovers of literature and media people alike, held interaction on the modern trends in creative and critical writing and premiered Tanuj Chopra’s “Punching at the Sun”, a new Indian film on American setting which has claimed Best Narrative Feature at the 2006 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Also featured during the function was Nagesh Kukunoor’s latest film “DOR”.

            In the festival the featured authors and filmmakers brought to light their unique perspectives and insights to highlight important socio-cultural issues in South Asia and the Diaspora.

            On the literary front, Kiran Desai, author of “The Inheritance of Loss” and recent winner of the prestigious “Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2006” and Samrat Upadhyay, the first Nepali winner of “Whiting Writer’s Award” for his acclaimed anthology of short stories “Arresting God in Kathmandu”, discussed on the ‘writing on the edge: collapsing borders in South Asian diasporic literature.’

            Before discussing on the writing trends, Desai read a passage from her award winning novel “Inheritance of Loss” to the audience that evoked a journey of an immigrant to the USA. This is Desai’s second novel set in mid-1980s India, on the cusp of the Nepalese movement for a democratic state. The comical and contemplative novel deftly shuttles between first and third worlds, illuminating the pain of exile, the ambiguities of post-colonialism and the blinding desire for a "better life," when one person's wealth means another's poverty.

            Likewise, panelist Samrat Upadhyay talked about what it meant to write from the “outside” and how he started writing as a career. Upadhyay’s first anthology of stories “Arresting God in Kathmandu” was an instant success in both the western and the eastern world. As the title suggests, his latest anthology of “The Royal Ghosts” is set in Nepal during the infamous Royal massacre in 2001. The latest book takes the readers directly to the heart of the troubled Himalayan nation.

            Tarun Tejpal, noted Indian journalist and writer of “The Alchemy of Desire” and another promising Indo-Canadian author of “Shooting Water” Devyani Saltzman, apart from discussing the post-modern trends of critical writings, underlined cultural clashes, breaking families and falling morals of post-modern men as the arresting source of force in their writings.

            Speaking on the occasion, Franklin S Odo, Director of Smithsonian APA program said, “It is evident that profiling us to be vigilant and to promote images and realities that stretch America’s ability to grasp ethnic, religious, national and cultural realities involving South Asian Americans as we all impact everything from foreign policy to pop-culture.”

            Established as a book club in 2000, the Network of South Asian Professionals of Washington DC has been organizing literary art festivals annually so that the newer generation of the communities could learn something about their literary leaders and critics and their contributions, Dina Khemlani, chairperson of the function told the Asian Fortune.