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.

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.

In the West, it is the opposite, like you are using these practices [meditation and yoga ] to further your ego by being more productive, being more this, and getting more out of your work and earning more money. In the East, the whole idea is that you are dissolving your essence through these practices.

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 do is work for three or four years and then I take a year off, and then I come back again and work for three or four years and then take another year off. It is not about just working and then writing for a year. That is not how it is structured. It is about doing very conscious goal-driven activities for four years and then taking a year off in complete surrender to discover facets of myself that I don't know exist and exploring interests with no commercial value associated with them at all.

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.

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.