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.

Journeys become very good metaphors. They always have the character put into circumstances that reveal him. If I had based my characters in New York and had them just sitting and thinking about life, it would be like what contemporary U.S. fiction is about. That is very heavy, literally, for me. It doesn't become mainstream enough because the pages don't turn themselves.

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.

I did not have any philosophy at all when I wrote the first novel. I was just wanting to capture experiences that I thought would be inspiring for Indians who are trying to break free from the very high-pressured family environments and do their own thing.

What I'm trying to do right now is truly answer my most deepest most unarticulated questions for myself through my writing in some form.

I think nothing, at an objective level, is either right or wrong.

India went through a dramatic revolution after the '90s when our economy started opening up for the first time and Indians were now experiencing the Western life, if you will. Drugs and sex and a lot of those influences came in as the economy stabilized, and we were growing up and experiencing that. The Indian writing market was very small at that time. Our literature was very attuned to what Western audiences were interested in, so everybody was writing about the slums in India and magic realism or stories about Hindus and Muslims and partition.