How many burgers tall are you?

Finally, a children’s book written by a child. In this adventure fantasy about a multiracial family (like ours!), a teenage girl and her twin brothers are sucked through a whirlpool to a strange island full of mysterious inhabitants and must figure out how to get back home–but not before helping their new friends battle the dreaded Pineapple Pirates.

When I.B. Stanley was 8, he told me he wanted to write a “real book” like my published plays. I told him fine, let’s do it. He wasn’t able to type yet, so our process was to start with my asking him to come up with a protagonist and a basic storyline. I suggested limiting it to 10 short chapters, and explained that each chapter should end in some kind of cliffhanger to encourage the reader to keep turning pages to find out what happens next.

After a few days, he told me who the characters were and what should happen in the first chapter, as specifically as possible, at my urging–what are their names, how old are they, where do they live? We had done a lot of camping, backpacking, and canoeing, so I wasn’t surprised that those elements came into play in his imagination.

I’d then type up a draft, print it out and read it to him. He would approve or reject each element and tell me specific changes to make and I’d make them. When he was satisfied with a chapter, we moved on to the next one. And thus we proceeded over the course of about a month.

He then wanted me to draw a picture for each chapter. I am not a visual artist in any way. I’d draw a pencil sketch for a chapter and get his approval or disapproval, working through the drawings the same way we’d worked on the chapters.

The story is his, the title is his, he approved all of the content. I just acted as his mechanism for making it concrete. We self-published it privately on amazon, ordered a bunch of author copies and gave them out to friends, family and teachers. Seven years have passed since then and we’ve now taken it live.

We hope you enjoy The Magical Island of Weirdos, available on amazon.

The Jeff & Shuvam Show #5: Khel Khel Mein

(and The Jeff & Ishan Show #1!)

Shuvam’s on vacation in India this month so guest co-host Ishan and I closed out the year by reviewing the Hindi-language film Khel Khel Mein, a hilarious romantic comedy about brutal honesty in the digital age.

Streaming now on Netflix, it’s a perfect film to watch for the holidays with your 13-and-ups.

It’s like The Hangover meets Glass OnionThis group of friends all come together and decide to play a game where everyone’s phones are public . . .You can guess how everything’s going to quickly go horribly wrong, but you can’t. You couldn’t guess. That’s one thing I loved about the movie.

– The Jeff & Shuvam Ishan Show

Dive into our review below. Our blinky Santa hats are widely available in the US but these two are important to us because we bought them on the street in Kolkata (Park Street and New Market) during various trips when we happened to be there in December. We treat them like gold!

The Jeff & Shuvam Show is shot in Philadelphia and produced in Kolkata by award-winning film director and my fellow former Fulbrighter Abhijit Chowdhury and his media production company Concept Cube.

Follow me on Bluesky!

Portfolio

Race & Class peer-reviewed UK journal article:
Nil Darpan: How a Mistakenly Published Play Helped Force Labour Reforms in British India

Democratic Communiqué peer-reviewed US journal, featured critical commentary:
Calcutta 1908: Apocalypse Now

Contingent Magazine:
The RRRevolution Will Be Cinematic (paid assignment; review and critical commentary of hit Indian film RRR)

Washington Post:
Supernatural Skeptics Don’t Know What They’re Missing
A Jewish-Hindu Connection
Four Pairs of Sandals as an Act of Faith

Brooklyn Rail nonfiction book reviews:
Exquisite Corpses
Holey Logic, Batman
Daddy, Who’s Grover Cleveland?
Theater of Cruelty

New York Times, “The City” section cover story:
Talk Radio (paid assignment)

Time Out New York Paul Robeson film festival preview:
The Last Emperor (paid assignment)

Book foreword:
Postcard Tales by Raja Singha

Drexel University Office of Global Engagement:
Jatra With Me

medium.com:
Distress Signals: My Posthumous Friendship With a Civil Rights Hero
A Hindu-Appalachian Christmas in the City of Brotherly Love

Hemispheres:
Full House (paid interview with rapper Nelly at international poker tournament in Monte Carlo)

Blog Posts:
My Visit to Minning Town (paid  assignment; Chinese TV series review and critical commentary)
Escaping the Racist Escape Room Paradigm
House of Time (Indian film review)
Remnants of Jewish Kolkata
To Think That I Saw It On Markenpower Street

Published Scripts, Films,  Performances, Books and Youtube Channel:
The Jeff & Ishan Show (Indian film review channel)
The Magical Island of Weirdos (editor-illustrator of I.B. Stanley’s children’s book)
My role in the Indian film Manbhanjan
Tesla’s Letters (stage play)
Lady in a Box (award-winning short film)
Coast to Coast AM With George Noory (media appearance)
An Existential Dinner Conversation with Tina Brock (media appearance)
Continuing Revelation (paid industrial film)
Medicine, Man (stage play)
The End That Does senior editorial adviser (nonfiction book)
The Golden Horseshoe: A Lecture On Tragedy (theatrical performance)
Jeffrey Stanley’s Boneyards (theatrical performance)
The Great Kohinoor Diamond Heist (escape room intro video)

Never Forget


I realize there are numerous examples of horrific cruelty in our history — the Middle Passage and Concentration Camps always come to mind first and foremost — but here’s one more. We might want to call such crimes unspeakable but they need to be spoken.

Look up Reginald Edward Harry Dyer for the full scoop. The thousands of citizens, including entire families, who gathered were attempting a Gandhian peaceful protest during a religious festival when the city of Amritsar was packed with pilgrims and tourists. This tragedy occurred just down the hill from the Sikhs’ holy Golden Temple.

The protest was held on rented private property in a back alley courtyard. Dyer had stupidly issued a Jim Crow-like order barring Indians from congregating in groups of 6 or more (in their own country) and decided to make an example of this particular group that included children.  British sources gave a figure of 379 killed with 1,100 wounded. The Indian National Congress counted more than 1000 dead and 1500 injured.

Churchill later publicly called it a “monstrous” and UnBritish act, although I wonder what his private remarks might have been, given his well-documented scathingly racist remarks about Indians and his willful starvation of 3.5 million Indians, 24 years after the Amritsar Massacre, during the Bengal Famine of 1943.

Dyer was also all about half-naked public floggings of private citizens and his soldiers fond of stopping pedestrians and making them slither down the street like worms at gunpoint. The British parliament viewed Dyer as a hero. By the way, it’s reenacted in the movie Gandhi as one of the watershed moments leading up to the widespread popularity of the Independence Movement.

My son viewing the bullet holes.

Happy MLK Day

Image result
MLK

“Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, “Is it politic?” Vanity asks the question, “Is it popular?” But, conscience asks the question, “Is it right?” And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because one’s conscience tells one that it is right.”

— Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.