In India the government is very chaotic and poorly run. They are forced into action by public pressure. When it's a larger event, there's a lot more pressure - to do something, to investigate, to give some kind of compensation to the victims. With the smaller attacks, the pain is concentrated on those affected, because they've not just been forgotten by everyone else, which is normal, they've also been forgotten by the government, which lets the cases drag on for years in the courts.
Karan MahajanThere 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.
Karan MahajanIt'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.
Karan MahajanThere'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.
Karan MahajanAmerica 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.
Karan Mahajan