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.

I wanted to write something that was very entertaining to read. The hardest part of this novel [The Yoga of Max's Discontent] was how to make a deeply spiritual transformation journey page-turning and adventurous. That was the hardest part to crack for me.

The first novel that I wrote was because I was having very interesting sorts of experiences, for Indians of my generation.

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.

Regarding some of the super powers that I reference, like walking on water, I haven't seen people do that, but once you get into the science, a lot of it starts to make a lot of sense, for example, like people being able to read your mind. It's very logical, because words are just a grosser form of thought, and thought is just a grosser form of feeling.

The moment you enter Bhutan, you notice that there are no traffic lights. It is almost like you've stepped into a Shangri-La or a vortex of time 200 years ago. Those kinds of experiences are very much of the countryside of Bhutan, where people are truly happy in the sense of not creating and wanting more.

The reality that we were growing up in was very young and vibrant, and nobody was capturing that part of India. I started to backpack after getting out of college. I hiked and did a lot of things nobody was capturing in art at all in India, so I wrote my first novel. It was a very, trippy, experience-filled novel, and it ended up doing very well in India because nobody was writing about that at that point.