I've never really felt that being part of a literary community is all that important. It can be extremely detrimental to a writer. It can damage succ….

There is a lot of anxiety in India about writers selling out to foreign audiences, but I’m neither flattering the Indian audience nor the American au….

When I first decided to be a writer, that meant dealing with preoccupations and concerns that took little account of Indian traditions. I saw India's….

I don't feel any great need to subscribe to a certain notion of Buddhism that says "You have to do this" or "You have to do that." Buddhism does not ….

Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee great literature..

No one is obliged to take a position on the urgent issues of the day, but there are times when our impoverished public sphere could do with some occa….

So much of democracy is built on antagonism. It institutionalizes a certain kind of antagonism. This is not to say that we shouldn't have any democra….

There was great political uncertainty in South Asia at the time of the Buddha. The older small tribal societies were cracking up and gave way to bigg….

I guess I am nostalgic for a time - the nineteenth century and early twentieth - when writers were, to use Stefan Collini's phrase, "public moralists….

To think that land reform is going to somehow automatically create an equitable system, I think that's just wrong. It's a very technical view of the ….

Modernity has created more problems than it is capable of solving. Millions of people are now condemned to wait endlessly for their redemption throug….

Gandhi saw how people have to re-think their own individuality before engaging in political activity. Otherwise they're just playing the game that th….

In America, you don't even have proper holidays. It's really one of the most prosperous slave societies in history. People work their asses off all y….

Western conception of history has had great consequences over the last two hundred years. You see it in the invasion of Iraq. You see it in almost ev….

I meditate at airports because those are the places where I’m extremely tense, and I often meditate while I’m walking down the street. I have a thoug….

The idea that human beings can make history, that is something quite unique to the modern West..

The internet has spawned people for whom knowingness is more important than knowledge. It equips you with the illusion of offering knowledge instantl….

Most people turn things like elections into a fetish and think it's the only way to go: if we just keep giving people the vote, that'll solve all our….

Politics now is really only about self-interest, which means it has violence built into it because your self-interest is going to collide with the se….

Buddhism doesn't really have much time for political mass-movements. We are so trained to think of politics in terms of acting collectively, acting a….

In India, love often follows marriage. I know many people who are still very deeply in love with their wives, who they barely knew before they were m….