Many people have accused me of having a romantic view, whereas I personally I feel sorry for those who have lost romance in their lives.

My writing is translated into every Indian language, it's distributed in pamphlets, in little private video things, it's everywhere. So it's a lovely pastime for the middle class to think of itself as the whole nation.

I actually did a quick survey of how caste plays out in contemporary India. The idea that democracy and development have in some ways eroded caste turned out not to be the case, that it has in fact been entrenched and modernised.

We need a new kind of politics. Not the politics of governance, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics of joining hands across the world and preventing certain destruction.

I do believe that fundamental to any real hope is that we do need to reconstitute what has been generally handed out as the recipe for "happiness" for the human race, and what has generally been decided counts as "progress." People arrive at a different understanding of happiness, however fragile it is. They find it in unexpected ways, in the most unexpected of places.

I stand by what I write and follow through on what I write.

It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.