Richard Crasta Writer
Richard Crasta (Konkani: रीचर्ड क्रास्ता (Devanagari); born 1952) is an Indian American writer and novelist, with a strong Indian identity in his writings. He is the author of the comic novel The Revised Kamasutra, nonfiction and essay collections like Impressing the Whites; Beauty Queens, Children and the Death of Sex, and some semi-fictional works like What We All Need. His first novel The Revised Kama Sutra was published under the name of Avatar Prabhu in the United States and Germany.Crasta was born in Bangalore, India. He grew up in Mangalore and lived in India till the age of 26. After emigration to the United States, he lived mostly in the New York metropolitan area for 18 years. He spends most of his present time in Asia.Crasta considers himself as a stateless person, a compulsive itinerant, a migrant, a man without moorings except to his imagination, his memories, and his childhood. He believes that his roots in the Mangalorean Catholic culture had a significant impact in his writings. Although he considers himself an open-minded agnostic, some writers attacked his first novel as anti-Christian; Crasta responds that he has been deeply influenced by fundamental Christian principles, which remain with him.
