Intolerance has always been with us, you know. The moment you have ideology, we have intolerance, whether it's the secular ideology or, you know ideocratic ideology, which always brings with it some kind of intolerance.

I tend to work best as a one-man Task Force, including even the roles of messenger, coffee maker and office cleaner.

My interest in culture generally is a comparative one, and I think that's where the word joy, I think, can be applicable. There's joy in actually seeing the relatedness, the connectedness of different cultures or recognising, for instance, your own culture in another or another culture in your own culture and feeling an air to all of them.

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

When you are looking for corruption, you should look at the entire stratum of the society, while some forms of corruption are direct, others are indirect.

Intolerance has become, I think, the reigning ideology of the world today, the intolerance versus intolerance and it's taken on lethal proportions.

As a president, you've got to show some example. I am disturbed for instance when I read that a candidate said, 'I will not probe anybody or something like that'. You don't fight corruption by sweeping everything under the carpet, you don't. You just say, am going to allow the law take its course; I am going to empower the agencies which has been set up for such specific purpose of stemming the corrupt out flow of resources from this nation and don't even talk to me about corruption beyond saying you going to strengthen existing institutions.