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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Reading galleys on the subway is the closest the publishing industry comes to having a standardized mating call. Karan Mahajan Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Terrorists have goals beyond their supposed pacts with God. They are authors, too. Karan Mahajan Read Quote
