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
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
I think there is a chance that Indian writers in America will start producing very interesting books in the years to come. – 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
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 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
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
When more Chinese started coming after the Gold Rush, employed on large projects like the Pacific Railroad, anti-Chinese sentiment became shrill. – Karan Mahajan
Reading galleys on the subway is the closest the publishing industry comes to having a standardized mating call. – 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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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 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
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
