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.

Now, I think of my writing as having two foundations: entertainment and meaning. The meaning portion is really me trying to answer my questions. The entertainment aspect of it is how I make a story that can make people turn the pages.

I have been meditating for many years now, but I think for quite a few years my relationship with meditation was very intellectual. I would do meditation for all the usual things that you would think about, to be more calm, be more productive, relieve stress.

The whole idea is that the combination of tight activity and slack activity allows me to be both productive and creative at the same time. In the four years that I am actually working in a proper job, I am earning money and I'm also writing with a lot of discipline on the side.

When I started, these [yoga] were very functional practices, as I said, productive to lose weight, or whatever, and now it has become a very spiritual kind of practice.

What helped me a lot was that I chose an American lead protagonist, because that liberated a lot from my own knowledge. If I had approached it from the perspective of an Indian main character, I think I would have assumed a lot of knowledge and I would have resented the presence of the author.

Here are two dichotomies here. In the West it is a very physical practice, and even meditation is a practice to become productive and more at peace. In the East, you think of the deep spiritual practices as a journey of complete dissolution of the self, the ego.