Karan Mahajan Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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Reading galleys on the subway is the closest the publishing industry comes to having a standardized mating call.
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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.
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I immigrated to the United States in 2001 for college.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I put my thoughts in a book, which must mean I don't want anyone to read them.
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To live in New York is to see the world as it is to come.
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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.
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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.'
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Literature has become too psychological.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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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.
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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.
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There's a hustling, but also a self-centred vibe you can get from people in Delhi.
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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?
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As a Punjabi, you only have to look at your own family's past to find horror stories about arranged marriages and brutality.