What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?

My first novel, 'The Tiger's Daughter,' embodies the loneliness I felt but could not acknowledge, even to myself, as I negotiated the no man's land between the country of my past and the continent of my present.

What was the function of poetry if not to improve the petty, cautious minds of evasive children?

In other words, my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show how I (and the hundreds of thousands like me) have transformed America.

In India, there are real consequences to inattention; drivers who jeopardize pedestrians can be lynched on the spot.

Ancestral habits of mind can be constricting; they also confer one's individuality.

I'm very moved by chaos theory, and that sense of energy. That quantum physics. We don't really, in Hindu tradition, have a father figure of a God. It's about cosmic energy, a little spark of which is inside every individual as the soul.