Incidentally, I am intrigued by how many European and Latin American writers expressed their political views in the columns they routinely wrote or write in the popular press, like Saramago, Vargas Llosa, and Eco. This strikes me as one way of avoiding opinionated fiction, and allowing your imagination a broader latitude. Similarly, fiction writers from places like India and Pakistan are commonly expected to provide primers to their country's histories and present-day conflicts. But we haven't had that tradition in Anglo-America.

As a novelist, your impulse is toward multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple perceptions, multiple nuances, the ambiguity in human communication. Fiction really is the ultimate home for that sense of ambiguity.

Today, practically every country outside the West is undergoing an intellectual, political, and cultural churning, from China to Bolivia, Egypt to Indonesia, but we haven't really had, after the 1960s, a major oppositional culture in Western Europe and America. The Occupy movement was so startling and welcome partly because it was the first such eruption of mass protests in decades.

So much of democracy is built on antagonism. It institutionalizes a certain kind of antagonism. This is not to say that we shouldn't have any democracy, but the fact is that democracy has hardened political identities and made them more violent.

Modernity has created more problems than it is capable of solving. Millions of people are now condemned to wait endlessly for their redemption through modernity.

Despite all the boosterish talk of globalization breaking down barriers, most writers in Anglo-America are still working within the nationalist assumptions of their traditionally powerful societies.

I myself, at one time, wanted to be like the explorers of the Himalayas that I used to read about; people intoxicated on the myth of history.