In the yoga sutras, they have this beautiful analogy that the journey of life is like the flight of an eagle, or the journey over multiple lifetimes is like a flight of an eagle. First, the eagle stretches its wings high, high, high, and experiences everything that the world has to offer in terms of flight. It's growing and flying and it's experiencing, and then it brings its wings down gracefully and that is the completion of the journey.

In the year that I take off, I don't have any goals. I just surrender to experiences like traveling or learning yoga and meditation or just living in a completely random place like Mongolia or Portugal or Bhutan. Then when I come back, I am much more intuitive, creative, right-brained. That kind of system has been working very well for me.

In the first 27 years of my life, I never had written a single non-technical word. I went to engineering college and went to business school. I never knew I could write fiction of any form.

The first novel that I wrote was because I was having very interesting sorts of experiences, for Indians of my generation.

What I need to do is to just deepen my well. I'm just experiencing life now.

There are people like me who are not there yet, who are still the eagle flying high right now, still experiencing more in the world and growing as a result of that - and that is my journey.

A lot of the book [The Yoga of Max's Discontent] is about karma and rebirth. Things like that are very attuned to my life as an Indian, but when I approach it from a perspective of a Westerner, then I have a skeptical, yet kind of novice view on it. I think that choice really liberated the story to be its own story. A lot of the conclusions that Max reaches on his own are not mine at all. So, I think that allowed the story to take on its own momentum, to have its own propulsive force.