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
The deadpan brilliance of John McCrea has been underrepresented in music since 2004, when Cake served up ‘Pressure Chief.’ – 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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
‘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
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
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
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
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
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
Apparently, the city of Delhi is a ‘character’ in my novels. I’d argue that it’s a … city… in my novels. – Karan Mahajan
