Unveiling Power and Passion: Inside Sangamirtha Iyer’s Riveting Memoir of Political Currents
If there is an inciting incident for Governing Bodies, it is the death of Iyer’s father, Adi, in the early aughts. In Part II of Governing Bodies, Iyer is addressing Adi, her Thatha’s youngest child (just as she is her father’s youngest child). Adi came to America in the mid-70s with seventy-five cents in his pocket and eventually established himself as a social worker. He, like Iyer, is deeply sensitive and committed to ahimsa, or nonviolence. He also instills the author with a love of poetry, especially Tamil poetry which focuses in large part on love and war, or “inness and outness.”
