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" Asian-Americans are still regarded as 'other' by many of their fellow-citizens. "
Karan Mahajan
Many
Regarded
Other
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" People love talking about the banality of evil and the fact that ordinary people do bad things. I actually want to stay away from that. "
Karan Mahajan
Love
People
Talking
" 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
You
City
Feel
" 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. "
Karan Mahajan
Life
Talk
American
" 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
Power
Men
Culture
" 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
Last
Her
Famous
" 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
Mental
People
Space
" Muslims remain the most convenient target for prejudice in a city like Delhi, which is far more ghettoized than Bombay or Bangalore, for example. "
Karan Mahajan
More
Target
Like
" 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. "
Karan Mahajan
World
Brooklyn
Last
" Literature has become too psychological. "
Karan Mahajan
Become
Too
Psychological
" 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.' "
Karan Mahajan
Intelligence
Rock
Say
" Terrorists are as torn as anyone else. "
Karan Mahajan
Anyone
Else
Terrorists
" Terrorists have goals beyond their supposed pacts with God. They are authors, too. "
Karan Mahajan
Too
Beyond
Goals
" 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!' "
Karan Mahajan
Talk
Energy
Voice
" To live in New York is to see the world as it is to come. "
Karan Mahajan
Live
World
See
" In some ways, the best novel about terrorism, though it's not a novel, is 'The Looming Tower' by Lawrence Wright or 'Perfect Soldiers' by Terry McDermott. "
Karan Mahajan
Terrorism
Some
Soldiers
" 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
Past
Family
Find
" 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. "
Karan Mahajan
Food
You
Saying
" 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. "
Karan Mahajan
Drawing
Try
Religion
" 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
Places
Lot
Job
" 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
Thinking
Space
Love
" 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. "
Karan Mahajan
Faces
New
Own
" 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
History
Great
Start
" When more Chinese started coming after the Gold Rush, employed on large projects like the Pacific Railroad, anti-Chinese sentiment became shrill. "
Karan Mahajan
Like
Started
Railroad
" When I had worked on my first book, I had readily shown bits and pieces to everyone - for encouragement, to force myself to write. "
Karan Mahajan
Everyone
Book
Encouragement
" There's a hustling, but also a self-centred vibe you can get from people in Delhi. "
Karan Mahajan
Hustling
Delhi
People
" 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
Culture
Good
Job
" I think people have turned terrorists into these larger-than-life devils and so are unable to write about them in the obvious way, which is as human, petty, bumbling. "
Karan Mahajan
Human
People
Petty
" 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. "
Karan Mahajan
Country
See
India
" I put my thoughts in a book, which must mean I don't want anyone to read them. "
Karan Mahajan
Mean
Book
Must
" I'm good at description and imparting flow to a story, but I don't necessarily understand the value of long scenes. "
Karan Mahajan
Flow
Long
Scenes