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"American students are greatly interested in works that examine diversity, which both my works do, and issues of free speech and expression, which my second book was born out of,” writer Murzban Shroff, who was on a speaking tour on the west coast of the USA mid October, informed Parsiana via email. The reading tour "covered a host of different events, each with a different audience: some readers and fans, some academics, some mid-management professionals,” he states. The author of the 2008 published Breathless in Bombay and Waiting for Jonathan Koshy published in 2015 spoke at the Institute of South Asia Studies, University of California (UCA), among other locations.
At the October 10, 2017 lecture at UCA Berkeley titled "From diversity to adversity: a writer’s journey into the unknown,” the author spoke of his passage "from (an)... advertising consultant who gave it all up to create meaningful literature, who went to villages and stayed with tribals to understand migration patterns.” The video of the talk (https://southasia.berkeley.edu/murzban-shroff) includes Shroff reading from his books.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The talk "shared what it was like to explore issues of rural India.” His message to the audience: "The poor experience poverty in real terms, without choices, without security, without hope. There is no point living in India if you are not conscious of ‘the other.’” Shroff described to the student community the "serious litigation spread over three years,” that he had to endure after Breathless... was published, but, as he says "emerged stronger to write his next book (Waiting for...).”
Shroff was a respondent in a case filed by Bombay resident Vijay Mudras over the use of the word ghati (originally indicative of family roots in the Western Ghats, now pejorative slang for anyone deemed lacking in urban sophistication) in Breathless.... Mudras claimed that the use of the term was hurtful to all Maharashtrians and wanted the book banned. The matter came to an end after a three-year legal battle (see "Shroff exonerated,” Events and Personalities, Parsiana, September 21, 2010).
"The complexity of Indian society offers a tremendous challenge to those hoping to understand Asian markets – and this is what my talk at St Mary’s (College in Moraga, California) delivered,” writes Shroff of his lecture there. Speaking on how to engage with disenfranchised communities to share their stories, the writer told the students of the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, on October 19 that "when your intentions are right and selfless, the story will write itself and the authenticity will come through.” The writer spoke of his research among those ousted by the Narmada Valley Project that displaced many rural communities, the Waghri community of gypsies in Bombay, transgenders and children of sex workers. The writer also read passages from his works at the bookstore Books Passage in Corte Madera, California and Eastwind Books in Berkeley.