"I don't think any writer is a friend to the reader if he or she is not funny." — Amitava Kumar

For years, in the wake of Rushdie, I had imagined magical realism to be the last refuge of the non-resident Indian.

My own personal conviction is that if I were writing without thinking about how images or how journalism is creating a world for us, I would not be happy about it.

In fiction, you don't invent the events. What is imaginative about it is the consciousness: how you think about the events and how you present them. And that changes the nature of everything, and that is the attraction of writing fiction.

I have always kept notes and have kept letters from my friends and mother, which is rather depressing, as it takes you to the past.