Correctional: A Memoir by Ravi Shankar
Hearing of Ravi Shankar’s arrest, my reaction was: they busted the sitar master? No, this Ravi Shankar is the American child of Indian immigrants who made his name in literary circle as poet and essayist. He entered the political fray when racially profiled by the NYPD (his wrongful arrest factored into overturning that policy). While on tenure track at Central Connecticut State University, he was pulled over for DUI. He served 90 days and found his academic career was being cancelled.
Correctional is Shankar’s meditation on his life experience. He wanted to be happily all American but found in his heritage a reservoir of images and ideals. He also found that his brown skin made him less than all American in some eyes. “Sometimes I forgot that the civil rights movement is only a little older than me and that as a country, we have so far to go before we can claim equal opportunity and social justice for all.”
Shankar sustained himself through hard times in part by remembering writers who fell afoul of the law: Oscar Wilde for homosexuality, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Daniel Defoe for political activity, Miguel de Cervantes and O. Henry for financial impropriety … And then he fell into more trouble. “In Tamil, there’s a word, ‘muttal,’ which roughly translates into ‘idiot,” he writes. Shankar’s travails are ripe for transformation into a great novel or short story collection.
