People in the East get a very skewed sense of America as this enormously rapaciously sexual place, this place where you have rappers and you have Donald Trump and things like that, which leads to a lot of confusion.

It's the feeling right from the beginning that the government is not on your side, the government thinks you're going to use this opportunity to cheat them, even though you've just been through this huge trauma.

There's no way of preventing the media from covering attacks as huge events and until the media stops doing that, they will be huge in people's consciousness, and we have to treat these things differently from the smaller random acts of violence.

I don't know what you can do if it's reported that there's been a small attack in the second- or third-largest city in country X that you have no connection to. I don't know what you're supposed to feel or how you're supposed to get into that.

terrorism is interesting to a novelist because it's a crime that's driven by an idea, as opposed to some kind of base materialist impulse. It's not like stealing from someone's house, or even assassinating someone. There are very complex ideological reasons behind these almost abstract acts of violence.

I'm pretty private as a person - people generally think they know more about me than they do, because I gregariously advertise what I want known. So it pains me to think people might feel they have an insight into my personal matters, which they most certainly do not.

Despite my critical take on the city, I love Delhi, on the whole - love its monuments, love how easily graspable the city's turbulent history is. The negative things I write about are considered normal here.