In my family, as in most middle-class Indian families I knew when I was growing up, science and mathematics were held in awe.
Because in this world, there is a line: on one side are the men who cannot get things done, and on the other side are the men who can. And not one in a hundred will cross that line. Will you?
When I was writing ‘The White Tiger’ I lived in a building pretty much exactly like the one I described in this novel, and the people in the book are the people I lived with back then. So I didn’t have to do much research to find them.
I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.
I am coming back to New York after five years, and it seems that psychics are taking over the city.
Nothing can stop a living thing that wants to be free.
The trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy.
A White Tiger keeps no friends. It’s too dangerous.
Iqbal, that great poet, was so right. The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave. To hell with the Naxals and their guns shipped from China. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India.
Neither. I am just one who has woken up while the rest of you are still sleeping.
I’ve lived in several countries and been a disaster everywhere.
Columbia University, where I went to study in 1993, insisted its undergraduates learn a foreign language, so I discovered French.
The coop is guarded from the inside.
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.
Mangalore, the coastal Indian town where I lived until I was almost 16, is now a booming city of malls and call-centres. But, in the 1980s, it was a provincial town in a socialist country.
In India, it’s the rich who have problems with obesity. And the poor are darker-skinned because they work outside and often work without their tops on so you can see their ribs.
India’s great economic boom, the arrival of the Internet and outsourcing, have broken the wall between provincial India and the world.
What keeps India safe really is the heroism of millions of poor Indians who every day reject the allure of terrorism. What keeps India safe is just the courage of poor Indians, not the actions of its government.
In a sense, being a full-time writer is less fun because there’s no office to go to anymore, there’s no set routine, there’s no schedule. It can be quite isolating.
Every book is a kind of struggle, and it’s a miracle when it comes out.