About me
History: I curate the monthly Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour, which won the national APIA Preservation Award. I created a visual intro to African American and South Asian solidarity, and publish the Secret Desi History blog.
Tech: I was the founder/CEO of BookFinder.com, an early ecommerce search engine that was the best way to find used, rare, and out-of-print books. Now I'm at UCSF, working on data science and web projects.
Activism: My work is rooted in racial and climate justice. I’m a core organizer with Bay Area Solidarity Summer and the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action, and previously with Brown & Green and the Desi Queer Helpline. I helped organize a national speaking tour on aviation and the environment, and interviewed 60 global climate activists and researchers.
Explore…
Index of projects
Climate / Transportation
- Year of No Flying (green travel blog, 2009-2010)
Trip Footprint(green travel carbon calculator, now offline, 2009-2014)- Aviation Justice (aviation & env. justice lecture tour, blog, 2011-2012)
- @AvJustice (aviation and climate justice newsfeed, 2011-2017)
- South Asians @ People’s Climate March (community contingent, 2014)
Technology
- Fake PubMed (Twitter bot, 2016)
- Plumage (biomedical resource discovery web interface, 2013-2014)
- Business::LCCN (Perl module for LCCN numbers, 2009-2011)
- HTML::ExtractMain (Perl module to extract web content, 2010-2013)
South Asian American
- Post-Election Hate in Berkeley, CA (report, 2016)
- DesiQ DoQumentation Project (LGBT conference documentation, 2013)
- Resistance Mixtape, vol. 1 (Asian Art Museum event, 2017)
- South Asian Progressive Conference (community conference, 2004)
- DesiFilter (South Asian name extraction tool, 2009)
History
- Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour (2012-2024)
- The Secret History of South Asian & African American Solidarity (2015)
- Secret Desi History blog (2017-2019)
- Kala Bagai Way street renaming campaign (2019-2021)
- “Black and Desi: A Shared History” (article, 2015)
- “Rebel Legacy” (article, 2014)
- “Our Name is Rebel” (Berkeley S. Asian history art show, 2013)
Bengali
- Bengali Tattoo (photo blog, 2009-2013)
- LGBT Programming at N. American Bengali Conference (1999-2014)
- Progressive Bengali Network (community group, 2002-2005)
Photos / Design
- Planning Love (geeky V-Day cards for architects & urban designers, 2014)
- My photos (Flickr sets, 2005-2014)
Blogs
- Medium blog (2014-2017)
High Tech Book Nerd(infrequently-updated personal blog, 2008-2013)
Books
- Books I’ve been reading (1995-2024)
BookFinder.com Journal(online book industry blog, 2002-2009)