I was pretty aimless as a youth, especially in Patna. I think reading saved me.
I've immersed myself in reading more and more of American literature, but no editor has asked me to comment on Jonathan Franzen or Jennifer Egan. It is assumed I'm an expert on writers who need a little less suntan lotion at the beach.
Mistaken identity, of course, has been the province of much postcolonial fiction. An important feature of this writing is the manner in which misrecognition has haunted all cognition.
A postcolonial writer who has often been credited with mixing the mundane with the magical, and history with fiction, is Salman Rushdie.
Inequality reigns in horrifying ways, and not everyone can even read, but the world of media and advertising withholds very little from the imagination of the dispossessed.
Does the entry of Indian H-1B worker augur a change in the relations of production in the world of cybertechnology? No, but the presence of such workers - their skills and their histories - introduce contradictions into the system that are not always easily absorbed or dissolved.
I have long held that many of the writers and artists working in the aftermath of 9/11 have presented a faux familiarity with the so-called terrorist mind.
Long ago, when I was in higher secondary school in Delhi, I read an essay by George Orwell in which he said there was a voice in his head that put into words everything he was seeing. I realised I did that, too, or maybe I started doing it in imitation.
All good works of art must ask this question: 'You want to breathe free, yes, but do you know how to kiss?'
You ask a politician a question, like, why they ran in an election, and you'll hear, I assume, something about wanting to contribute to the community or bring about social justice. I had no such high goals.
Indian writers in English are rank individualists. Even among the progressives, there is a strain of anti-leftism, or at least a suspicion of any organized politics.
Criticism is, or ought to be, a judicious act.
My favourite writer is John Maxwell Coetzee.
When we were getting married the Hindu way in Arrah, we had an old guest who asked my wife what her 'good name' was. I think she'd heard that I had married a Muslim. When my wife said, 'Mona Ahmed Ali,' the lady looked at me and exclaimed, 'Oh, so you've married a terrorist.'
I grew up in India during the 1960s and '70s in a meat-eating Hindu family. Only my mother and my grandparents were vegetarians. The rest of us enjoyed eating - on special occasions - chicken or fish or mutton.
An essay is not an op-ed that tells its reader what to think. An essay is a complicated working-out of one's own contradictions and complicities.
In the poetry of immigrants, nostalgia is as common as confetti at parades or platitudes at political conventions.
Such is the impurity of our enterprise, as writers or as critics, that even in the act of proclaiming our freedom from the demands of authenticity, we are never free from brandishing it.
In 1997, Alain de Botton published his book 'How Proust Can Change Your Life.' I was charmed by it. I remember using it in a course on cultural criticism for a graduate class that had a mix of theorists and creative writers.
Everything in American public life, when it comes to race relations, serves as a frame for a history of violence and degrading humiliation.
