Of course I had a piece of luck I couldn't have imagine for myself in a million years: I got an agent. That sped up the process. I'd say it's a good idea, getting an agent.

The West, in the form of American capitalism, is seen as having won, but people are beginning to offer alternatives again, sometimes in retrograde ways like radical Islam.

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.

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.

It's rare that you get to read, let alone teach, an arbitrary canon of your choosing in a tight time setting, and I tore through a fairly wide range of Indian writers, some contemporary - like Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie - and others older, like R.K. Narayan. And I think what happened at that stage was that I was forced to take a position in my own writing style that was more fixed, as opposed to reading a book at a time and defining myself in opposition to or in awe of it.

For whatever reason, people know that car crashes can happen but they don't live with that fear every day when they're driving, or they're able to overcome it.

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.