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 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.

I don't think of the ashram world as being any more spiritual than the corporate world.

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.

What I need to do is to just deepen my well. I'm just experiencing life now.

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.

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.