As for the Jewish-American question, what's funny is that I grew up in India, and the Jewish-American comparison is better for second-generation Asians. I'm sure there's something about globalization that has globalized our neuroses, so that I, growing up in India, somehow turned out very similar to you. It's a weird thing, when you think about it, but everyone now is exposed to a mainstream white American world, wherever you are. And so there's this need to belong or measure yourself up to that white world, which leads to all sorts of straining.

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 think I know a lot of fake two-faced Ivy League liberals, and I am constantly testing them to see if their liberalism is a conversational liberalism, one that depends solely on what will fly at a party. And I can tell when stuff like this happens, I swear to God, they are tomorrow's conservatives.

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.

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.

When I worked as an editor, I read new novels being published in India every few days. They excited me tremendously for the first fifty pages or so, and boasted some true linguistic genius at times, but none of those writers could occupy more than one mind at once.

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.