In Delhi, where I grew up, commerce is brusque. You don't ask each other how your day has been. You might not even smile. I'm not saying this is ideal - it's how it is. You're tied together by a transaction. The customer doesn't tremble before complaining about how cold his food is.
American life is based on a reassurance that we like one another but won't violate one another's privacies. This makes it a land of small talk.
I had a thick accent, and people didn't understand me, and I was ashamed, and I fumbled. I radiated an uncertain energy; sometimes baristas sensed this and wouldn't try to talk to me, and then an insecure voice in my head would cry, 'He's racist!'
When a certain swathe of India's population considers the country's ancient past, it doesn't see a country fragmented into kingdoms, savaged by caste divisions, and mired in poverty; rather, what's envisioned is a vast, unified Hindu empire stretching from Kashmir to the Indian tip at Kanyakumari.
The Hindu nationalists see a religion near perfection save for the tampering of Muslims and Christians. So they fall upon these groups, rather than try to reform their own practices by drawing on India's sophisticated philosophical traditions.
I see flaws as a kind of beauty.
I remember returning to Bangalore after a few months of travel and seeing it as a first-world city, like New York or San Francisco. This may be obvious to some people, but I grew up in Delhi, and I had no experience of how someone from a 'Tier 2' city may view a 'Tier 1' city. You really do emigrate between worlds when you come from those towns.
Literature has become too psychological.
I tend to see my characters from inside and outside at once; this is a technique I use to retain a slight distance. It means my characters can act in unexpected ways on two axes: physical and mental. It isn't just, 'I thought this and then I did this,' which is the technique of the modern psychological novel.
Muslims remain the most convenient target for prejudice in a city like Delhi, which is far more ghettoized than Bombay or Bangalore, for example.
Getting some distance allowed me to develop a hunger for India and to come back and explore it in a way I wouldn't have had I been living here. And that probably made me more political as well.
I think there is a chance that Indian writers in America will start producing very interesting books in the years to come.
Apparently, the city of Delhi is a 'character' in my novels. I'd argue that it's a ... city... in my novels.
I'm good at description and imparting flow to a story, but I don't necessarily understand the value of long scenes.
I put my thoughts in a book, which must mean I don't want anyone to read them.
Cobain the writer is funny and self-aware and snotty with a knack for off-the-cuff profundity. Remarking to a friend that his band will be called 'Nirvana,' he scribbles next to it the words 'Oooh eerie mystical doom.'
Novelists get to say plenty in their massive tomes; rock singers only get four-minute songs with two verses and a chorus' worth of lyrics, and so there's a real pleasure in accessing the intelligence behind the music, even if it doesn't qualify as 'great literature.'
I lived in Brooklyn from 2007 to 2012 but for the last few years have resided in Austin, Texas, where my world - especially the world of downtown - is predominantly white.
New York City has no need to move on from 9/11 because, in a sense, it moved on days after, moments after.
There is not one New York but thousands - mixed-up conurbations and microclimates with their own internal logics and charms, dreams and juxtapositions, faces and tongues.
