America going into this huge, costly, never-ending war created huge debt, which became a huge problem in Congress and led to it stalling many times, putting a halt to different kinds of social progress.

It's amazing to me in retrospect that I wrote as much as I did with full-time jobs. Each city gave me a new distance from - and a new way of looking at - India. I'm grateful for the movement. I feel as if I've crammed several lives into one.

How do you prevent attacks from becoming the very fabric of lived life in a city? Of course it's very easy to say you should be fearless and go about your daily life.

I'm interested in the way that terror is almost a psychosomatic state. You may have suffered a small injury for a few seconds, but the rest of the year you're constantly on the alert, your injury is constantly with you - and I mean this on a city-wide scale.

I have to admit that I was terrified of ending the book, precisely because I go around saying about pretty much every book I read, "It fell apart at the end." I have friends who are waiting to ridicule me forever.

There have been many cases in which the government keeps promising compensation, but doesn't pay out. Many of the shopkeepers in Lajpat Nagar were scolded and told that they were inflating their damage estimates - they were asked to revise down their estimates.

America going into this huge, costly, never-ending war created huge debt, which became a huge problem in Congress and led to it stalling many times, putting a halt to different kinds of social progress.