When I'm engaged in a story my health is not a big deal, but when I'm not doing anything, if you sit me down, I can get tied up in my own medical dramas. So I much prefer to work.

It seemed to him that in Annawadi, fortunes derived not just from what people did, or how well they did it, but from the accidents and catastrophes they dodged. A decent life was the train that hadn’t hit you, the slumlord you hadn’t offended, the malaria you hadn’t caught.

One thing that was very clear to me is that the young people in a place like Annawadi aren't tripping on caste the way their parents are. They know their parents have these old views.

I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is.

There's some way in which we would prefer not to see very clearly the immense gifts and intelligence of some of the people who live in our most abject conditions. Maybe there are some things at work in deciding who gets to be society's winners and who gets to be society's losers that don't have to do with merit.

When I pick a story, I'm very much aware of the larger issues that it's illuminating. But one of the things that I, as a writer, feel strongly about is that nobody is representative. That's just narrative nonsense. People may be part of a larger story or structure or institution, but they're still people. Making them representative loses sight of that. Which is why a lot of writing about low-income people makes them into saints, perfect in their suffering.

I think it's this congenital problem with journalism that we oversell the difference we make. We make small differences.