I had grown up in a privileged, upper-caste Hindu community; and because my father worked for a Catholic hospital, we lived in a prosperous Christian neighborhood.

Having plenty of living space has to be the greatest luxury in a city, and I guess in some sense Bombay is the antithesis of what living in Canada must be.

Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people - and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country.

Like most people who live in India, I complain about corruption, but know that I can live with corrupt men. It is the honest ones I secretly worry about.

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.

At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the west, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of society.

...the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse

The book of your revolution sits in the pit of your belly, young Indian. Crap it out, and read. Instead of which, they're all sitting in front of color TVs and watching cricket and shampoo advertisements.

You ask 'Are you a man or a demon?' Neither, I say. I have woken up, and the rest of you are sleeping, and that is the only difference between us.

See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of?? Losing weight and looking like the poor.

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.

When I was growing up in the south Indian city of Madras, there were only two political parties that mattered; one was run by a former matinee idol, and the other was run by his former screenwriter.

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?

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.

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 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