Nandini Patwardhan grew up in Mumbai, India and has lived in the United States for the last several decades. She possesses a graduate degree in Mathematics from the acclaimed Indian Institute of Technology. Over the course of her career as a software developer, she worked on platforms ranging from mainframes to the internet.
Winner of the 2020 Bay Area Journalism Award from San Francisco Press Club! Click here for more details.
From Math Nerd to Biographer
It took a very specific kind of nudge to take Patwardhan from being a techie math nerd to a biographer. That nudge was provided by The Man Who Knew Infinity, the story of the Indian mathematician, S. Ramanujan. Although Patwardhan had heard of Ramanujan during college, reading his biography opened new vistas of inspiration, of past lives hiding in plain sight waiting to reveal their truths. To read more about how Ramanujan led Patwardhan to Dr. Anandi-bai Joshee, click here.
But, how does one go about uncovering those long-ago stories? Thanks to the internet, Patwardhan was able to do almost all of the research online. The good news is that the lack of a university or other institutional affiliation did not prove to be a hindrance. To read more about her research journey on the virtual road, click here.
Writing the book took almost a decade. Interspersed with a major illness, job changes, and a move across states, the only constant was researching and writing Radical Spirits. Patwardhan started with mere curiosity and, in the early stages, wondered if she had the authority and the credentials to tell the story of Dr. Anandi-bai Joshee. But, before long, it got to the point where no other pursuit made as much sense as deeply understanding this story and sharing it with the world.
Nandini Patwardhan used her perspective as both an insider and an outsider in the two countries she calls home, India and the United States, to tell the story of Indian as well as American Radical Spirits.
Why Write?
“To leave a stain upon the silence”
Wallace Stegner in “Angle of Repose”
Patwardhan started writing personal essays around the year 2000. She wanted to record her experiences as an immigrant mother to her two US-born children. Writing soon became her passion as it was through writing that she arrived at a better understanding of her core self. She has found over the years that what she writes on a given day becomes a letter from her current self to her future self.
Patwardhan’s personal essays have been published in, among others, the New York Times, Slate, Alternet, Talking Writing, The Hindu, Mutha Magazine, and India Currents.
To read some of her recent writing, click here. To read about her other books, click here.