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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.

Karan Mahajan

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Karan Mahajan
Age: 40
Born: 1984
Born: April 24
Novelist
Stamford
Connecticut
Write
Despite
Take
Easily
Whole
Critical
Writing
Negative
Turbulent
Things
City
Delhi
Love
Normal
Monuments
Cities
Monument
History
Considered

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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.
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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.
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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.
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I don't know what you can do if it's reported that there's been a small attack in the second- or third-largest city in country X that you have no connection to. I don't know what you're supposed to feel or how you're supposed to get into that.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm pretty private as a person - people generally think they know more about me than they do, because I gregariously advertise what I want known. So it pains me to think people might feel they have an insight into my personal matters, which they most certainly do not.
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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?
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There have been many cases in which the government keeps promising compensation, but doesn't pay out. Many of the shopkeepers in Lajpat Nagar were scolded and told that they were inflating their damage estimates - they were asked to revise down their estimates.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Karan Mahajan
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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.
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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.
Karan Mahajan