In a sense, journalism can be both helpful and detrimental to a writer of fiction because the kind of writing you need to do as a journalist is so different. It has to be clear, unambiguous, concise, and as a writer often you are trying to do things that are more ambiguous. I find that writing fiction is often an antidote to reading and writing too much journalism.

The coop is guarded from the inside.

In my family, as in most middle-class Indian families I knew when I was growing up, science and mathematics were held in awe.

Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent—as strong, as talented, as inteligent in every way—to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man's hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.

Like most people who live in India, I complain about corruption, but know that I can live with corrupt men. It is the honest ones I secretly worry about.

Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people - and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country.

See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of?? Losing weight and looking like the poor.