Neither. I am just one who has woken up while the rest of you are still sleeping.

I’ve lived in several countries and been a disaster everywhere.

Strange thoughts brew in your heart when you spend too much time with old books

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.

Indira Gandhi had been this very powerful, dominating, ambiguous mother figure. Ambiguous because she was tyrannical, she had imposed...she had suspended Indian democracy for a few years but she also was the woman who had defeated Pakistan in war at a time when most male politicians in India had secretly feared fighting that war, so that here in India even today Indira Gandhi is called by Indian nationalists the only man ever to have governed India.

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.

Nothing gives us greater pride than the importance of India's scientific and engineering colleges, or the army of Indian scientists at organizations such as Microsoft and NASA. Our temples are not the god-encrusted shrines of Varanasi, but Western scientific institutions like Caltech and MIT, and magazines like 'Nature' and 'Scientific American.