The longing for a very garish kind of success seems as widespread among writers as among investment bankers.

The hope that fuels the pursuit of endless economic growth - that billions of consumers in India & China will one day enjoy the lifestyles of Europeans and Americans - is as absurd & dangerous a fantasy as anything dreamt up by Al-Qaeda. It condemns the global environment to early destruction & looks set to create reservoirs of nihilistic rage & disappointment among hundreds of millions of have-nots - the bitter outcome of the universal triumph of Western Modernity, which turns the revenge of the East into something darkly ambiguous, and all its victories truly Pyrrhic.

The act of writing should not be accompanied by the sense of an audience, someone peering over your shoulder, but in nonfiction I think it’s almost imperative that you identify an audience so you can confirm or challenge or undermine whatever ideas or prejudices they might have about your subject.

I think that Indian writing in English is a really peculiar beast. I can't think of any literature - perhaps Russian literature in the nineteenth century comes close - so exclusively produced by and closely identified with a tiny but powerful ruling elite, the upper-caste, Anglophone upper middle class, and dependent for so long on book buyers and readers elsewhere.

Politics now is really only about self-interest, which means it has violence built into it because your self-interest is going to collide with the self-interest of the rest of the world. That's inevitable.

No one is obliged to take a position on the urgent issues of the day, but there are times when our impoverished public sphere could do with some occasional assertions of literary and moral authority.

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.