It Has Always Been Very Difficult For Writers To Survive Commercially In India Because The Market Was So Small. But That's Not True At All Any More. It's One Of The World's Fastest Growing And Most Vibrant Markets For Books, Especially In English.
Nothing Gives Us Greater Pride Than The Importance Of India's Scientific And Engineering Colleges, Or The Army Of Indian Scientists At Organizations Such As Microsoft And Nasa. Our Temples Are Not The God-encrusted Shrines Of Varanasi, But Western Scientific Institutions Like Caltech And Mit, And Magazines Like 'nature' And 'scientific American.
In Terms Of Formal Education, I May Somewhat Lacking. I Never Finished School. I Am A Self-taught Entrepreneur, That's The Best Kind There Is, Trust Me
I Grew Up, As Many Indians Do, In An Archipelago Of Tongues. My Maternal Grandfather, Who Was A Surgeon In The City Of Madras, Was Fluent In At Least Four Languages And Used Each Of Them Daily.
An Honest Politician Has No Goodies To Toss Around. This Limits His Effectiveness Profoundly, Because Political Power In India Is Dispersed Throughout A Multi-tiered Federal Structure; A Local Official Who Has Not Been Paid Off Can Sometimes Stop A Billion-dollar Project.
Like Most Of My Friends In School, I Was A Member Of Multiple Circulating Libraries; And All Of Us, To Begin With, Borrowed And Read The Same Things.
I Am Coming Back To New York After Five Years, And It Seems That Psychics Are Taking Over The City.
Go To The Tea Shop Anywhere Along The Ganga, Sir, And Look At The Men Working In That Tea Shop - Men, I Say, But Better To Call Them Human Spiders That Go Crawling In Between And Under The Tables With Rags In Their Hands, Crushed Humans In Crushed Uniforms, Sluggish, Unshaven, In Their Thirties Or Forties Or Fifties But Still "boys." But That Is Your Fate If You Do Your Job Well - With Honesty, Dedication, And Sincerity, The Way Gandhi Would Have Done It, No Doubt.
Columbia University, Where I Went To Study In 1993, Insisted Its Undergraduates Learn A Foreign Language, So I Discovered French.
