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" Literature has become too psychological. "
Karan Mahajan
Become
Too
Psychological
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" To live in New York is to see the world as it is to come. "
Karan Mahajan
Live
World
See
" It's getting worse under Prime Minister Modi. The economic miracle has failed, to a degree, and people are reaching back to a kind of imagined Hindu past for a feeling of pride. And that feeling of pride necessarily comes from denying any kind of Muslim heritage. People my age seem to be becoming illiberal in a way that I'm surprised by. "
Karan Mahajan
Age
Pride
People
" Every time a blast happens, people ask, 'But why would someone do this?' Weirdly, it hasn't been answered well anywhere - neither in fiction nor non-fiction. "
Karan Mahajan
Ask
Why
Well
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Karan Mahajan
Me
Distance
Back
" 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
Country
American
Immigration
" 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
" 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
People
Young
Reality
" 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
Band
Strength
Rock And Roll
" I immigrated to the United States in 2001 for college. "
Karan Mahajan
States
United
United States
" By 2013, at the age of 29, I was failing. I had left two good jobs in succession to complete a novel I'd been tooling around with since 2009, had enrolled in a graduate programme in Texas, as far away from home as possible, to finish it - and yet: what did I have to show for it after five years of work? "
Karan Mahajan
Home
Good
Finish
" There's a hustling, but also a self-centred vibe you can get from people in Delhi. "
Karan Mahajan
Hustling
Delhi
People
" 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.' "
Karan Mahajan
Writer
Band
Friend
" 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
" The thing about a failure is that it is possible to deny it forever. "
Karan Mahajan
Failure
Deny
About
" 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
" 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
" Terrorists are as torn as anyone else. "
Karan Mahajan
Anyone
Else
Terrorists
" Asian-Americans are still regarded as 'other' by many of their fellow-citizens. "
Karan Mahajan
Many
Regarded
Other
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Karan Mahajan
Experience
People
Travel
" Apparently, the city of Delhi is a 'character' in my novels. I'd argue that it's a ... city... in my novels. "
Karan Mahajan
Character
Argue
Novels
" I see flaws as a kind of beauty. "
Karan Mahajan
I See
See
Flaws
" 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
" 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