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Richard Crasta ( (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. ==Early life and education== Richard Crasta was born in 1952 to John Baptist Crasta and Christine Crasta (''née'' D'Souza) in Bangalore, India. Richard had two brothers and a sister.〔 His father John, son of Alex and Nathalia Crasta, originally hailed from Kinnigoli in South Canara district, about 20 miles from Mangalore. John was a World War II veteran and prisoner-of-war who survived a Japanese prison camp.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 title = Mr. Richard Crasta (Star: October, 2003 ) )〕 Richard had a strict middle-class Catholic upbringing and grew up in Mangalore in the 1960s and early 1970s.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 title = Biography of Richard Crasta )〕 He began writing when he was ten. He wrote a 12,000 word novel in which the hero was a composite of John F. Kennedy and Robin Hood. Writing was just an outlet for his fantasies, which he used to escape his real life. An important factor in his development was the church and the convent school to which he was sent as a boy, and the secondary school of his adolescence.〔 Ever since the age of 16, he knew he had a novel to write, but felt he was too poor to afford clean white paper. He completed his Bachelor of Arts (BA) in ''Economics, History and Political Science'' from the University of Mysore in 1972.〔 He was eventually accepted into the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), through which he became the Assistant Commissioner and Sub-Divisional Magistrate of Chickballapur Subdivision in Kolar district and Belgaum Subdivision in Belgaum district.〔 Later, he became Special Deputy Commissioner of Shimoga district.〔 However, this position suited him neither professionally nor socially as a creative writer.〔 He later served in the IAS for 13 years.〔 Crasta travelled to the United States in 1979, enrolling in the American University in Washington, D.C..〔 He worked for a New York literary agency and taught English at a New York college through 1981, and completed his Master of Arts (MA) degree in ''Literature and Communication''.〔 Crasta emigrated to New York City in the United States in 1984.〔 Crasta received his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in ''Creative Writing'' from Columbia University in 1987. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Richard Crasta」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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