Karan Mahajan Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Karan Mahajan

  People, Car, Overcoming

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• The only solace can come from the state. In the Boston bombing, only a handful of people died in the end, even though a huge number were injured - and that was a huge attack in America. The government was very involved in providing aid and following up in the investigation.

  Karan Mahajan

  People, Aids, Solace

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Cities, Negative

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  8 Copy quote

• Of course I had a piece of luck I couldn't have imagine for myself in a million years: I got an agent. That sped up the process. I'd say it's a good idea, getting an agent.

  Karan Mahajan

  Luck, Imagine

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• There's no way of preventing the media from covering attacks as huge events and until the media stops doing that, they will be huge in people's consciousness, and we have to treat these things differently from the smaller random acts of violence.

  Karan Mahajan

  Violence, Consciousness

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• The feeling I got from my research is that the victims of bombings end up becoming as alienated from the government as the terrorists who cause the attacks.

  Karan Mahajan

  Feelings, Victim, Terrorist

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Karan Mahajan

  Opportunity, Thinking, Feelings

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Karan Mahajan

  Compensation

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• In India the government is very chaotic and poorly run. They are forced into action by public pressure. When it's a larger event, there's a lot more pressure - to do something, to investigate, to give some kind of compensation to the victims. With the smaller attacks, the pain is concentrated on those affected, because they've not just been forgotten by everyone else, which is normal, they've also been forgotten by the government, which lets the cases drag on for years in the courts.

  Karan Mahajan

  Running, Pain, Giving

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Karan Mahajan

  Country

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I have to admit that I was terrified of ending the book, precisely because I go around saying about pretty much every book I read, "It fell apart at the end." I have friends who are waiting to ridicule me forever.

  Karan Mahajan

  Book, Waiting, Forever

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Karan Mahajan

  Book, Understanding, Punk

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The problem of empathy is pretty universal, and pretty much breaks down across America. People can't feel beyond their drawn borders. And skin color and culture have a lot to do with that.

  Karan Mahajan

  People, Empathy, Skins

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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?

  Karan Mahajan

  Country, Thinking, Missing

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Karan Mahajan

  Pain, Thinking, People

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• As for the Jewish-American question, what's funny is that I grew up in India, and the Jewish-American comparison is better for second-generation Asians. I'm sure there's something about globalization that has globalized our neuroses, so that I, growing up in India, somehow turned out very similar to you. It's a weird thing, when you think about it, but everyone now is exposed to a mainstream white American world, wherever you are. And so there's this need to belong or measure yourself up to that white world, which leads to all sorts of straining.

  Karan Mahajan

  Growing Up, Thinking, World

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• We're at an interesting phase of Asian and Asian-American writing, where we might succeed in having readers look at us as creative individuals who write with fury and fire about the world, and in new ways, without having them say things like "I read a really good Indian book," or "That Malaysian fellow writes very well." So I hope by identifying as Indian I can get people who don't usually read "ethnic" or "Indian" literature to read that literature and enjoy it.

  Karan Mahajan

  Book, Writing, People

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• It's rare that you get to read, let alone teach, an arbitrary canon of your choosing in a tight time setting, and I tore through a fairly wide range of Indian writers, some contemporary - like Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie - and others older, like R.K. Narayan. And I think what happened at that stage was that I was forced to take a position in my own writing style that was more fixed, as opposed to reading a book at a time and defining myself in opposition to or in awe of it.

  Karan Mahajan

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Karan Mahajan

  Mind, Genius, Excited

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Karan Mahajan

  Fall, Writing, People

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Karan Mahajan

  People, Empathy, Interest

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I think I know a lot of fake two-faced Ivy League liberals, and I am constantly testing them to see if their liberalism is a conversational liberalism, one that depends solely on what will fly at a party. And I can tell when stuff like this happens, I swear to God, they are tomorrow's conservatives.

  Karan Mahajan

  Party, Thinking, League

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• There's this great fashion among writers, especially those who follow the transnational conservatives like V.S. Naipaul, to disavow one's place in the world as a sort of box that has sprung you but is only worthy of your scorn, because it once contained you. And I've been tempted to say foolish things, like "I am an American writer" or "I belong nowhere," but the truth is I'm perfectly proud of identifying as an Indian writer, even if that might hurt my bottom line.

  Karan Mahajan

  Fashion, Hurt, World

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The West, in the form of American capitalism, is seen as having won, but people are beginning to offer alternatives again, sometimes in retrograde ways like radical Islam.

  Karan Mahajan

  People, Islam, Sometimes

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Karan Mahajan

  War, Progress, Different

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

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