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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
