I was seen as a traitor for marrying a Muslim - a Pakistani at that.
— Amitava Kumar
I thought I'd be the first to introduce herbal tea to Patna. White tea, ginger tea, rooibos, camomile. No one touched it. On subsequent visits, I'd find the packets decorating the shelves in my parents' dining room.
Governance in India comes in the iron-clad armour of bureaucracy. Anyone in uniform considers it his or her right that we regard them as some sort of deity.
Even fake news tries to convince us of its reality, but it does so mostly by appealing to your preconceived notions, your shared biases, or your prejudice. How to do the opposite? To create a sense of the real and then challenge your biases. I think that is my favourite aspect of writing, and that is what I've tried to do in 'The Lovers.'
One of my earliest lessons in guilt was imparted in childhood through the story of the death of Mahatma Gandhi's father.
I am an artless serf of Cupid.
Mistaken identity, of course, has been the province of much postcolonial fiction. An important feature of this writing is the manner in which misrecognition has haunted all cognition.
Writers interest me for their style, their obsessions, the ways in which they approach the world.
It's so easy for folks to normalize their opinions, to engage in a groupthink that is damaging.
An essay is not an op-ed that tells its reader what to think. An essay is a complicated working-out of one's own contradictions and complicities.
Each employed immigrant has his or her place of work. It is only the taxi driver, forever moving on wheels, who occupies no fixed space. He represents the immigrant condition.
All good works of art must ask this question: 'You want to breathe free, yes, but do you know how to kiss?'
I haven't reported in grand detail on rituals of American life, road journeys or malls or the death of steel-manufacturing towns. I think this is because I feel a degree of alienation that I cannot combat.
I didn't know V. S. Naipaul very well, and to a large extent, my acquaintance with him was limited to meetings at literary festivals.
While I ridicule books of self-help, I'm also quite susceptible to them. They help simplify things.
In 1997, Alain de Botton published his book 'How Proust Can Change Your Life.' I was charmed by it. I remember using it in a course on cultural criticism for a graduate class that had a mix of theorists and creative writers.
To write what is not dead on the page, one has to be open to all kinds of disturbances and challenges and confusion.
I have a couple of thick files about things that have gone wrong between people; I ought to write about them in the manner of a thriller. It would finally convince me that I was a real writer.
In the early 1990s, my relatives in Patna, even those who had no interest in reading or writing, wanted Parker fountain pens.
The recurring question that anyone from Bihar gets is whether Patna has improved. I'm not interested in answering that question.
Novels describe what it means to be alive at a given moment.
India's nuclear-test blasts have pretty much put to rest the myth of Indians being peace-loving Gandhians.
We learn that our lives find narrative form neither in the tired, familiar slogans of our captains nor in the symmetries of ideological camps, but in the differences that thrive behind settled, more clear-cut divisions.
I grew up in India during the 1960s and '70s in a meat-eating Hindu family. Only my mother and my grandparents were vegetarians. The rest of us enjoyed eating - on special occasions - chicken or fish or mutton.
When I close my eyes and think of a writer, I don't imagine him or her as someone who is sitting above me on a pedestal, blindfolded, holding the scales of justice in one hand! No, I see sentences.
I think criticism is often so pallid, so tame. I wish it were more performative.
If India breaks your heart with untold inequalities, it also surprises you with the unheralded achievements of its most humble citizens.
Our public culture is one in which only the young and the beautiful will succeed. If you're forty, you're finished.
There is a great deal of freshness and charm in '400 Blows.' There is also a great deal of visual poetry in the way in which Truffaut's camera looks at his beloved city.
In the poetry of immigrants, nostalgia is as common as confetti at parades or platitudes at political conventions.
Everything in American public life, when it comes to race relations, serves as a frame for a history of violence and degrading humiliation.
In academe, we ought to temper our criticism of the idea of self-help because, in a more complex way, it is precisely what we offer our students through our teaching.
The radio stations will happily recycle a badly worded statement by a politician all day but will steer clear of broadcasting more than once or twice a poem by Tomas Transtromer or Rita Dove.
I'm generalizing wildly, but academic books find safety in explanations that reduce the chaos of social life.
I like to write about real people, real crimes. But what has increasingly come to interest me, and also appear to me as a challenge, is the idea of doing strange things with what is real. Take what is real and make it more or less real.
We live in a cynical system where the powerful are able to exploit the demand of the aggressive few, from whichever religion or group, to bargain for more power or cynical advantage.
When we were getting married the Hindu way in Arrah, we had an old guest who asked my wife what her 'good name' was. I think she'd heard that I had married a Muslim. When my wife said, 'Mona Ahmed Ali,' the lady looked at me and exclaimed, 'Oh, so you've married a terrorist.'
'An Obedient Father' is perhaps the novel that, some might say, Arundhati Roy had wanted to write when she wrote 'The God of Small Things.'
Inequality reigns in horrifying ways, and not everyone can even read, but the world of media and advertising withholds very little from the imagination of the dispossessed.
A postcolonial writer who has often been credited with mixing the mundane with the magical, and history with fiction, is Salman Rushdie.
Any real piece of writing is an act of courage.
Most writers censor themselves in awful ways. I do, too.
I'm not ashamed to confess that I often note down many of the crazy things my children say.
India allows you the luxury of a million inequalities. You can be a schoolboy selling tea to passengers sitting in a state transport bus, but you are royalty when compared to a shirtless, barefoot village boy, from what was traditionally considered an untouchable caste, living on snails and small fish - and sometimes rats.
I have long held that many of the writers and artists working in the aftermath of 9/11 have presented a faux familiarity with the so-called terrorist mind.
I've immersed myself in reading more and more of American literature, but no editor has asked me to comment on Jonathan Franzen or Jennifer Egan. It is assumed I'm an expert on writers who need a little less suntan lotion at the beach.
I arrived in the U.S. for graduate study in literature in the fall of 1986. I was twenty-three. After a year, I began to paint, even though I had come to the U.S. intending to become a writer.
A wonderful innovation of the Occupy Wall Street movement was the use of the human microphone - the name given to the body of the audience repeating, amplifying, each statement made by the speaker.
Like every other self-respecting academic, I'm distrustful of self-help books.
I like listening to Garrison Keillor's 'The Writer's Almanac' with my daughter.
