Karan Mahajan
Karan Mahajan

I met a number of young, striving, enterprising people in cities like Aligarh and Hubli. But the mental landscape of these towns is out of sync with their reality. Many of these towns are hellholes.

Karan Mahajan
Karan Mahajan

We discount the physical, when, in fact, much of life is physical. People's personalities are partly formed by, or in response to, how they take up space; the physical mask has some relation, howsoever obscure, to the mental work happening underneath.

Karan Mahajan
Karan Mahajan

If India hadn't become a troubled space for me, somehow I wouldn't have any reason to write about it. So the fact that it's a lost love, or something, is why I keep thinking about it obsessively.

Karan Mahajan
Karan Mahajan

As a Punjabi, you only have to look at your own family's past to find horror stories about arranged marriages and brutality.

Karan Mahajan
Karan Mahajan

There's a hustling, but also a self-centred vibe you can get from people in Delhi.

Karan Mahajan
Karan Mahajan

Yashpal, writing in the nineteen-fifties, sought to indict this culture of men, Hindus and Muslims alike, who value their freedom and power over the rights and lives of women.

Karan Mahajan
Karan Mahajan

After a post-Bill Berry softening with albums like 'Up' and 'Reveal,' R.E.M. seems to be toughening up again; on the strength of the first single, 'Discoverer,' the band's new record looks to continue with the same muscular rock and roll that defined its last album, 'Accelerate.'

Karan Mahajan
Karan Mahajan

Terrorists are people, too - they are given to error. Naipaul and then DeLillo do a good job in their novels of drawing this out: I'm thinking of DeLillo's contention in 'Mao II' that terrorists have replaced writers as the people who 'alter the inner-life of the culture.' I thought that was marvellous!

Karan Mahajan
Karan Mahajan

In the five months I wrote the final draft of 'The Association of Small Bombs,' I never fell out of the book. The world was real to me: plausible and powerful.

Karan Mahajan
Karan Mahajan

When I lived in Delhi, it was burdened with so many futures - fast roads, malls, flyovers - that one felt almost obliged to be hopeful. Now that hope has diminished, you can feel the city going into a frenzy to reinvent itself. I miss living there.

Karan Mahajan
Karan Mahajan

I travelled around small-town India a lot for a job from 2010-2012, and I was impressed by the energy I encountered in these places.

Karan Mahajan
Karan Mahajan

The deadpan brilliance of John McCrea has been underrepresented in music since 2004, when Cake served up 'Pressure Chief.'

Karan Mahajan
Karan Mahajan

When we talk about 9/11 and 26/11 - which is the shorthand for the Mumbai attacks in 2008 - we're talking about the most successful terrorist attacks in history. When you start trying to study the most successful event of its kind, it actually doesn't make for great fiction because there isn't the kind of failure in it that fiction thrives on.

Karan Mahajan
Karan Mahajan

When you've finished reading every last thing by a famous writer, literary convention holds that you move on to his or her letters, the DVD extras peddled by publishers.

Karan Mahajan
Karan Mahajan

'This Is Not That Dawn' is remarkable in part for its careful and sensitive attention to women's lives - and also for its harsh critique of men and their failure to stop violence.

Karan Mahajan
Karan Mahajan

If Asian America exists, it is because of systemic racism.

Karan Mahajan
Karan Mahajan

Asian-Americans are still regarded as 'other' by many of their fellow-citizens.

Karan Mahajan
Karan Mahajan

When more Chinese started coming after the Gold Rush, employed on large projects like the Pacific Railroad, anti-Chinese sentiment became shrill.

Karan Mahajan
Karan Mahajan

American policies toward Asians reached a nadir in 1924, with the implementation of a law that sought 'to preserve the idea of American homogeneity' and denied admission to the country to most non-whites. Immigration from Asia was banned completely, with the establishment of an 'Asiatic Barred Zone.'

Karan Mahajan
Karan Mahajan

I immigrated to the United States in 2001 for college.