“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
“Reading galleys on the subway is the closest the publishing industry comes to having a standardized mating call.”
― Karan Mahajan
“Apparently, the city of Delhi is a ‘character’ in my novels. I’d argue that it’s a … city… in my novels.”
― 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
“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
“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
“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
“The deadpan brilliance of John McCrea has been underrepresented in music since 2004, when Cake served up ‘Pressure Chief.’”
― 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
“’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
“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
“If Asian America exists, it is because of systemic racism.”
― Karan Mahajan
“Asian-Americans are still regarded as ‘other’ by many of their fellow-citizens.”
― 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
“I immigrated to the United States in 2001 for college.”
― Karan Mahajan
“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
“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
“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
“I see flaws as a kind of beauty.”
― 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
“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
“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
“Literature has become too psychological.”
― 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
“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.”
― Karan Mahajan
“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
“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
“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
“I think there is a chance that Indian writers in America will start producing very interesting books in the years to come.”
― Karan Mahajan
“I’m good at description and imparting flow to a story, but I don’t necessarily understand the value of long scenes.”
― Karan Mahajan
“I put my thoughts in a book, which must mean I don’t want anyone to read them.”
― 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
“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
“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
“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
“New York City has no need to move on from 9/11 because, in a sense, it moved on days after, moments after.”
― Karan Mahajan
“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
“To live in New York is to see the world as it is to come.”
― Karan Mahajan
“The thing about a failure is that it is possible to deny it forever.”
― Karan Mahajan
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“Terrorists are as torn as anyone else.”
― 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
“Terrorists have goals beyond their supposed pacts with God. They are authors, too.”
― Karan Mahajan
“I think that a lot of terrorists have been middle class and, more surprisingly, many of them have been people who were not directly affected by the things they’re angry about.”
― 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
“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
“There’s a hustling, but also a self-centred vibe you can get from people in Delhi.”
― Karan Mahajan
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