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 am a secularist in the Gandhian sense of the word, not the Nehruvian one. Nehru thought religion was an antique superstition which stood in the way of rational modern politics. I side with Gandhi, who wanted religious figures out of politics but also was suspicious of purely rational politics.

People who write about issues like poverty or terrorism are a part of the elite, and the distance between the elite and nonelite is growing very fast. You can move around the world but meet only people who speak your language, who share the same ideas, the same beliefs, and in doing so you can lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of the world does not think or believe in or speak the everyday discourse of the elite.

We are always boosting or trying to prop up the ego by fulfilling some desire or other, and always craving affirmation from the outside.

The ’60s was the last time when large groups of people in the West searched for alternative modes of being. In a society like India’s, which is still not fully modern or totally organized, and has a great deal of tolerance for otherness in general, they find the cultural license to try other things, to be whatever they want to be.

Whether you are in the West, the East, the North, or the South, we should all feel pressured to attempt more, find new ways of outwitting ourselves, in our writing and thinking.

Most books germinate within you for a long time before they are ready to come out. I wrote several drafts of the novel over many years and when I finally got to the last one, it didn't take much time.