My wife and I took a sabbatical and we went from Europe to India, where we lived in an ashram for six months and did meditation and yoga vigorously, like from 5:00 in the morning until 10:00 in the night in very austere circumstances. I think then my practice became less superficial, more like the traditional definition of what meditation was: to truly find oneness.

I don't know if there is really an objective truth about either. I liken this to what Buddhism says about the individual, that change starts with the individual. I think it is really about purifying your own actions, and I have seen that in my own life.

When I came to the U.S., Kraft sponsored my green card, so I was at Kraft foods and I owed them, I felt. But then as my life purified more and more, I felt that that corporation was not doing the right things for the world. That led me to a company that makes organic baby products. It is very pure in its actions and how it deals with others.

There is a role for growth and experiencing the world, and pushing the boundaries of that, and then there is a time to bring it within. All people are at different stages of that journey.

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.

What has happened in most of my books is the call to the extraordinary world, the hero's push, or that push has come to him.

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.