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People think that because I write about India I must be trying to portray India in a way.

India lends itself well to fictionalization, but ultimately, it all depends on the writer's imagination.

At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the West, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of society.

If the Indian people want stories written about themselves, how they want them told, they are going to have to make them, they're going to have to finance them. If you let Hollywood do it, Hollywood is going to get it wrong most of the time.

The demand in India is to have a hit, which becomes a promotion for the movie and makes people come to the theater. You have five songs and different promotions based on those. But when I do Western films, the need for originality is greater. Then I become very conscious about the writing.

I feel as if I can take Indian stories, make them mine and take them to the world.

A lot of people do comedy about India, but they're not from India. It's a Kwik-E-Mart perspective. I want to provide a genuine view and maybe one on how we see the West.

I've been wanting to write a book about what goes into creating a novel, and the story behind 'A Passage to India' is especially interesting.

India is a land of plenty inhibited by poverty; India has an enthralling, uplifting civilization that sparkles not only in our magnificent art, but also in the enormous creativity and humanity of our daily life in city and village.

If India hadn't become a troubled space for me, somehow I wouldn't have any reason to write about it. So the fact that it's a lost love, or something, is why I keep thinking about it obsessively.