Best 46 quotes of Karan Mahajan on MyQuotes

America going into this huge, costly, never-ending war created huge debt, which became a huge problem in Congress and led to it stalling many times, putting a halt to different kinds of social progress.

As for the Jewish-American question, what's funny is that I grew up in India, and the Jewish-American comparison is better for second-generation Asians. I'm sure there's something about globalization that has globalized our neuroses, so that I, growing up in India, somehow turned out very similar to you. It's a weird thing, when you think about it, but everyone now is exposed to a mainstream white American world, wherever you are. And so there's this need to belong or measure yourself up to that white world, which leads to all sorts of straining.

But I think the goal of all these attacks is the same, which is to seize maximum media attention. Maybe some of these attacks were meant to be small. Some of them might have been failed larger attacks. And some of them are just part of a new strategy of doing lots of tiny attacks, as opposed to one large one.

Despite my critical take on the city, I love Delhi, on the whole - love its monuments, love how easily graspable the city's turbulent history is. The negative things I write about are considered normal here.

For whatever reason, people know that car crashes can happen but they don't live with that fear every day when they're driving, or they're able to overcome it.

How do you prevent attacks from becoming the very fabric of lived life in a city? Of course it's very easy to say you should be fearless and go about your daily life.

I also think that there's something about the graphic, political nature of such attacks, mixed with the fact that it all seems completely random to the victims.

I don't think sexual repression leads to violence, but I can see the situation where you're trying very hard to be very religious and to be good but pornography exerts a strong force on you, and one way to get further away from it would be to immerse yourself in a strong religious system.

I guess my point in general is that, if you look closely, who is in politics to self-identify - these are the people who flip easily, from right to left, pro-Muslim to anti-Muslim, etc. - versus who, whether on the right or left, is moved by genuine interest and empathy.

I have to admit that I was terrified of ending the book, precisely because I go around saying about pretty much every book I read, "It fell apart at the end." I have friends who are waiting to ridicule me forever.

I'm interested in the way that terror is almost a psychosomatic state. You may have suffered a small injury for a few seconds, but the rest of the year you're constantly on the alert, your injury is constantly with you - and I mean this on a city-wide scale.

I'm more interested than Philip Roth in understanding women, even if I do it imperfectly. But that book, Portnoy's Complaint, is literary punk in this way that is rare.

In India the government is very chaotic and poorly run. They are forced into action by public pressure. When it's a larger event, there's a lot more pressure - to do something, to investigate, to give some kind of compensation to the victims. With the smaller attacks, the pain is concentrated on those affected, because they've not just been forgotten by everyone else, which is normal, they've also been forgotten by the government, which lets the cases drag on for years in the courts.

I think I know a lot of fake two-faced Ivy League liberals, and I am constantly testing them to see if their liberalism is a conversational liberalism, one that depends solely on what will fly at a party. And I can tell when stuff like this happens, I swear to God, they are tomorrow's conservatives.

I think Indians will pick up on a lot of the direct commentary on Delhi, which Americans will obviously miss, while Americans might get more out of watching pop-culture play out in unusual ways in a foreign country. Who knows?

It's amazing to me in retrospect that I wrote as much as I did with full-time jobs. Each city gave me a new distance from - and a new way of looking at - India. I'm grateful for the movement. I feel as if I've crammed several lives into one.

It's easier to set off a bomb that kills innocent civilians in a market than it is to plot an assassination, but that obviously was true before as well. I also think it's now easier to get attention for a small attack that goes off in a random market. It's almost like there's a marketplace for terror in the media, and these people are supplying the attacks, knowing that the media will cover them sensationally.

It's rare that you get to read, let alone teach, an arbitrary canon of your choosing in a tight time setting, and I tore through a fairly wide range of Indian writers, some contemporary - like Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie - and others older, like R.K. Narayan. And I think what happened at that stage was that I was forced to take a position in my own writing style that was more fixed, as opposed to reading a book at a time and defining myself in opposition to or in awe of it.

It's the feeling right from the beginning that the government is not on your side, the government thinks you're going to use this opportunity to cheat them, even though you've just been through this huge trauma.

It's very good for us to say, as liberals, that we should be moved by everything, but the fact is that there's just so much competing for our attention.

Literature has become too psychological. 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.

Of course I had a piece of luck I couldn't have imagine for myself in a million years: I got an agent. That sped up the process. I'd say it's a good idea, getting an agent.

People are rushed and inspired by the success of Indian writers, and are falling over themselves to write novels. Every Indian is writing a novel right now. No one wants to revise.

People in the East get a very skewed sense of America as this enormously rapaciously sexual place, this place where you have rappers and you have Donald Trump and things like that, which leads to a lot of confusion.

terrorism is interesting to a novelist because it's a crime that's driven by an idea, as opposed to some kind of base materialist impulse. It's not like stealing from someone's house, or even assassinating someone. There are very complex ideological reasons behind these almost abstract acts of violence.

The only solace can come from the state. In the Boston bombing, only a handful of people died in the end, even though a huge number were injured - and that was a huge attack in America. The government was very involved in providing aid and following up in the investigation.

The problem of empathy is pretty universal, and pretty much breaks down across America. People can't feel beyond their drawn borders. And skin color and culture have a lot to do with that.

There's this great fashion among writers, especially those who follow the transnational conservatives like V.S. Naipaul, to disavow one's place in the world as a sort of box that has sprung you but is only worthy of your scorn, because it once contained you. And I've been tempted to say foolish things, like "I am an American writer" or "I belong nowhere," but the truth is I'm perfectly proud of identifying as an Indian writer, even if that might hurt my bottom line.

The West, in the form of American capitalism, is seen as having won, but people are beginning to offer alternatives again, sometimes in retrograde ways like radical Islam.

We're at an interesting phase of Asian and Asian-American writing, where we might succeed in having readers look at us as creative individuals who write with fury and fire about the world, and in new ways, without having them say things like "I read a really good Indian book," or "That Malaysian fellow writes very well." So I hope by identifying as Indian I can get people who don't usually read "ethnic" or "Indian" literature to read that literature and enjoy it.

When a bomb actually goes off, there's a lot of confusion, and people often don't know a bomb has gone off. For a long time, people might think there's been an electrical malfunction or something else that's exploded.

When I worked as an editor, I read new novels being published in India every few days. They excited me tremendously for the first fifty pages or so, and boasted some true linguistic genius at times, but none of those writers could occupy more than one mind at once.

You can say that a small attack is one in which relatively few people die, but the minute you say that, you can sense the ironies in that statement. A blast in which five people are killed is a meaningful blast.

During these years in the small-talk wilderness, I also wondered why Americans valued friendliness with commerce so much. Was handing over cash the sacred rite of American capitalism—and of American life? On a day that I don’t spend money in America, I feel oddly depressed. It’s my main form of social interaction—as it is for millions of Americans who live alone or away from their families.

Every child is a packet of disappointments, hurts, dangers.

Every way he turned, his past was detonated, revealing tunnels and alternative routes under the packed, settled earth of the present.

Growing up in Delhi, one gets addicted to pollution.

Most of the people in the audience were white and old. They had the gaunt look of people who have seen all the important movies and can now only look forward to reruns.

No action is safe from meaning.

Silence is the small man’s only defense.

there was a long silence before the screams started, as if, even in pain, people watched each other first to see how to act.

The roots of shame run deep.

To ask a child to feel sympathy for the poor is harder than getting him to feel sympathy for a chicken or a goat—at least you can see a goat being slaughtered.

What if I've died a long time ago and come here? he wondered. What if the defining characteristic of hell is that you're locked in an endless, blind battle to reform it?

Why do the poor refuse to give an accurate picture of their suffering?

Yes, madam,” he said, with the exceeding politeness of a man who has just imagined raping you.