Avni Doshi
Avni Doshi

Breakout Author Avni Doshi Interviewed Online by Darien’s Sharbari Ahmed

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The India Cultural Center and Greenwich Library will welcome breakout literary star Avni Doshi on Wednesday, April 14 at 7 p.m., who will be interviewed online by fellow author Sharbari Ahmed of Darien. — an announcement from the India Cultural Center and Greenwich Library

The online discussion takes place at 7 p.m., Wednesday, April 14. Doshi will discuss her stunning and unforgettable debut novel, Burnt Sugar, a love story and a story about betrayal, but not between lovers — between mother and daughter, which has been shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize for Fiction. In Burnt Sugar, Doshi tells the story of Tara, who, in her youth, was wild. She abandoned her marriage to join an ashram, and while Tara is busy as a partner to the ashram’s spiritual leader, little Antara, her daughter, is cared for by an older devotee, Kali Mata, an American who came to the ashram after a devastating loss.

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Sharbari Ahmed contributed photo

From the Subcontinent to Darien, Local Author Becomes TV Scriptwriter, Later Faces Social Media Mob

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Years after she left her job as a scriptwriter for the prime-time television series “Quantico,” Darien resident Sharbari Ahmed recently found herself a target on social media. It was made up of Twitter and Facebook users who were outraged that the show had a recent episode in which Hindu nationalist characters plotted a terrorist act that would be blamed on Muslims.

Ahmed, a Muslim who came to the United States from Bangladesh when she was an infant, hadn’t even been working with the TV program for the past two seasons. Yet she found herself being attacked online, with more and more Twitter and Facebook users piling on with retweets, “likes” and comment after comment accusing her of attacking Hindus. While many Muslims peacefully live in India, as do Hindus in Bangladesh and even Pakistan, there’s a lot of tension on the Subcontinent between many members of either religion, against the other. On Twitter, Sharbari had criticized Hindu nationalists and violence attributed to them in India.