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.

In the yoga sutras, they have this beautiful analogy that the journey of life is like the flight of an eagle, or the journey over multiple lifetimes is like a flight of an eagle. First, the eagle stretches its wings high, high, high, and experiences everything that the world has to offer in terms of flight. It's growing and flying and it's experiencing, and then it brings its wings down gracefully and that is the completion of the journey.

I think his karma became to serve in nature and not to serve in the world, while I think my karma is to be in the world.

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.

A lot of the book [The Yoga of Max's Discontent] is about karma and rebirth. Things like that are very attuned to my life as an Indian, but when I approach it from a perspective of a Westerner, then I have a skeptical, yet kind of novice view on it. I think that choice really liberated the story to be its own story. A lot of the conclusions that Max reaches on his own are not mine at all. So, I think that allowed the story to take on its own momentum, to have its own propulsive force.

In the year that I take off, I don't have any goals. I just surrender to experiences like traveling or learning yoga and meditation or just living in a completely random place like Mongolia or Portugal or Bhutan. Then when I come back, I am much more intuitive, creative, right-brained. That kind of system has been working very well for me.