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I think there's really strong social stratification in South Asia.

Mohsin Hamid

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Mohsin Hamid
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Think
Thinking
Stratification
Asia
South
Strong
Social
Really

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My earliest memories are of watching Star Trek and MASH while my parents barbecued chicken in the back yard. I was an American kid, through and through.
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Why the brevity? Because I'd rather people read my book twice than only half-way through
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And with a last stardrop, a last circle, I arrive, and she's there, chemical wonder in her eyes.
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For a combination of reasons, and despite evident fondness for American products and individuals, my impression is that most Pakistanis have extremely negative views of the US as a geopolitical player.
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I responded to the gravity of an invisible moon at my core, and I undertook journeys I had not expected to take.
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Television has given Pakistan a truly open national forum for the first time in its history. Ideas are debated, leaders are assessed and criticised, and a nation of 170 million people is finally discovering, together, what it thinks.
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Our countries are weaker: they cannot protect us from imported goods, they can't protect us from climate change, they cannot protect us from epidemics. These things cross borders. But the kind of cooperation that would protect us from those things was completely lacking and because of this there's been a backlash. People feel vulnerable.
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I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.
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As a child I read all kinds of stuff, whether it was 'Asterix and Obelix' and 'Tin Tin' comic books, or 'Lord of the Rings,' or Frank Herbert's sci-fi. Or 'The Wind in the Willows.' Or 'Charlotte's Web.'
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What used to help us to cope with transience was stuff like, extended families all living in one place, or very strong religious beliefs, or a tribe that would outlive you. That stuff is getting weaker.
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My mother has been to Mecca to perform her hajj my dad hasn't. I come from a very liberal family, so even the people who are outwardly religious tend to subscribe to gender equality, the importance of open-mindedness, all that stuff. My family is generally nonprescriptive.
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I am not much of a researcher as a novelist I write mainly from experience.
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America's strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.
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I would have bet money that Britain would not vote to leave the EU, and I would have been wrong. I would have bet money that Trump would not have been the Republican nominee, and I would have been wrong and I certainly would have bet money that he wouldn't win the election.
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The ethnocultural connotations of the burkini ban are very strong. It's as absurd as mandating that women have to go topless on the beach. If I were a woman, I definitely would not want to wear a burkini or a headscarf. But it's not about what I want.
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The paralysis that we have right now when we think about migration is partly because we can't imagine what the world would look like in the future. So I think it's important for writers and artists to try to imagine that.
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India to someone who lives in Lahore is like Queens to someone who lives in Lower Manhattan - it's not far away, and yet it doesn't exist.
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Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.
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