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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 think it is really a personal journey of purification, rather than whether something external is going to be good or bad. Anything external will always live in that polarity - a combination of good and bad.