We used to have a genre called Muslim social drama which nobody in the world has. Writers from North India and Bengal came and wrote great stories. Then that stopped.
India will be successful when UP, Bihar, West Bengal, Assam and other parts of North East India are strengthened. India cannot develop till the eastern part of the country develops.
The truth is nobody was a Muslim until Public Enemy came out. Then, everybody was Muslim this and Muslim that. It's a bandwagon thing. Islam is a way of life... it's a religion. It's not just something you put on a record.
After graduation, I wanted to work for 'Sassy', which I loved, but it had folded. So I wound up at 'Seventeen' for three years on staff and two as a contributor, and I wrote these great stories that nobody ever believes 'Seventeen' does. Serious stories for teens about social justice issues - gun control, migrant farm workers.
Southern India has an abundance of coconut, so the coconut chutney hails from there. Eastern India Bengal produces mustard oil, which is used in its traditional tomato chutney.
Everybody knows that the great reversed triangle of land, with its base in the north and its apex in the south, which is called India, embraces fourteen hundred thousand square miles, upon which is spread unequally a population of one hundred and eighty millions of souls.
I used to write stories a lot because you had to fill your hours some other way than watching television. So my imagination was vivid, and I used to write a lot of stories. I wrote a novel, which I still have, which is so awful.
The reality that we were growing up in was very young and vibrant, and nobody was capturing that part of India. I started to backpack after getting out of college. I hiked and did a lot of things nobody was capturing in art at all in India, so I wrote my first novel. It was a very, trippy, experience-filled novel, and it ended up doing very well in India because nobody was writing about that at that point.
India uses Bollywood, rather cinema, to tell its stories. It is one of the largest filmmaking nations in the world and so your talents get to tell stories about politics, love and drama through films.
I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.
I don't think writers choose the genre, the genre chooses us. I wrote out of the wish to create order out of disorder, the liking of a pattern.
Writers like to feel sorry for themselves, which is easy to do in private, but when called on to feel sorry for ourselves in social situations, we will often do so by sharing terrible book tour stories.
William Maxwell's my favorite North American writer, I think. And an Irish writer who used to write for 'The New Yorker' called Maeve Brennan, and Mary Lavin, another Irish writer. There were a lot of writers that I found in 'The New Yorker' in the Fifties who wrote about the same type of material I did - about emotions and places.
I used to write random little stupid things when I was five, but then the first song I really wrote was one called 'Fingers Crossed,' which is on SoundCloud.
There was a lot of protest after Bravo, from countries like India, for example. India was the first country which came forward and proposed at the United Nations that all of these nuclear tests should be stopped, that there should be a complete ban on nuclear testing.
A lot of people think I came out of nowhere. When you start as a songwriter, nobody knows who you are. I met the guy who wrote 'Yeah' by Usher, which was a huge smash, and nobody knew who he was.
A majority of my blind students at the International Institute for Social Entrepreneurs in Trivandrum, India, a branch of Braille Without Borders, came from the developing world: Madagascar, Colombia, Tibet, Liberia, Ghana, Kenya, Nepal and India.