In America there are people advocating for trans rights and people like Vice President Pence, who is vehemently opposed. In Pakistan, too, you have all kinds of folks - from flamboyant gay fashion designers and female Air Force pilots to the Taliban. A cross-dressed man used to be the top TV talk show host. It was actually quite radical. So the diversity of these societies is often lost on people.

You can live in the same city your entire life and still be completely a foreigner when you step out, in your old age, onto the street.

I think wars, climate change, all that stuff is going to move people. And so I wanted to say, "What if the migration apocalypse occurs and it isn't an apocalypse at all?" Maybe we will still find ways to be happy and for our children and grandchildren to thrive and the world to move on.

I'm often surprised that, you know, you encounter all types of humanity. And very often, there are some very decent people who don't stereotype even when you might, in your own mind, have stereotyped them to think that they will.

If your sense of self is destabilised, to imagine being another becomes pretty easy.

Lahore, the second largest city of Pakistan, ancient capital of the Punjab, home to nearly as many people as New York, layered like a sedimentary plain with the accreted history of invaders from the Aryans to the Mongols to the British.

I think that right now, the global political crisis that we see all over the place has to do with virulent nostalgia. Everywhere, people are talking about taking us back to the good old days. Whether that's the "caliphate," or Britain before the EU, or "Make America Great Again." But, we can't go back and many people wouldn't want to go back even if we could.