The one conclusion I have reached is that whiskey is a great leveler. You might be a hotshot advertising executive or a lowly foundry worker, but if you cannot hold your drink, you are just a drunkard.

My books may highlight corruption, brutality and venality, but they also show that if these things come to light, there is rectification. The voiceless do have a voice; democratic mechanisms and accountability do exist.

The slums are not a place of despair. Its inhabitants are all working towards a better life.

For me, the day job comes first. That's why I call myself a diplomat who writes, not a writer who masquerades as a diplomat. If the day job demands it, I won't write at all. I write in what I call 'the crevices of my day job', and that comes only on weekends.

...a rainy day ceases to have meaning for a person who has lived in the open under a monsoon cloud most of his life.

And I realized again that real life is different from reel life.

The writer's is an interior world, a world of the mind.