The Revised Kama Sutra created waves when it was first published almost twenty years ago. Now hailed as a classic, Richard Crasta’s gloriously comic and poignant insight into naïve Third World dreamers of the American Dream is a veritable guide to the Indian experience of childhood, puberty, sex, colonialism and yearnings not easily fulfilled, at least not in the original land of the Kama Sutra.

Vijay Prabhu is a small-town, middle-class Indian boy negotiating the pains and frustrations that come with growing up in a culture that celebrates the sterility of Jesuit schools and boys’ boarding houses and has Pillars of Oppression in place to nip in the bud any adolescent longings. To realize his destiny, both spiritual and sexual, Vijay embarks on a journey that will take him to the purported new land of the Kama Sutra—the land of free sex, greenbacks and Campbell’s Cream of Chicken Soup—the United States of America.

Richard Crasta grew up in Mangalore and has spent the years since then trying to recover from the experience. He managed to squeak through with an unimpressive BA degree, joined the Indian Administrative Service, and then escaped to the US to nurture his profoundly uneducated soul at assorted schools including Columbia University. On a dark Christmas night in New York, he wrote the first pages of his first novel, The Revised Kama Sutra, which was first published by Penguin India to considerable acclaim and later by many other publishers worldwide. He became a full-time writer and New York resident and went on to publish six other books, including the satirical Impressing the Whites and the Bush-whacking and comical What We All Need.