What I do is work for three or four years and then I take a year off, and then I come back again and work for three or four years and then take another year off. It is not about just working and then writing for a year. That is not how it is structured. It is about doing very conscious goal-driven activities for four years and then taking a year off in complete surrender to discover facets of myself that I don't know exist and exploring interests with no commercial value associated with them at all.
In the first 27 years of my life, I never had written a single non-technical word. I went to engineering college and went to business school. I never knew I could write fiction of any form.
India went through a dramatic revolution after the '90s when our economy started opening up for the first time and Indians were now experiencing the Western life, if you will. Drugs and sex and a lot of those influences came in as the economy stabilized, and we were growing up and experiencing that. The Indian writing market was very small at that time. Our literature was very attuned to what Western audiences were interested in, so everybody was writing about the slums in India and magic realism or stories about Hindus and Muslims and partition.
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.
What I'm trying to do right now is truly answer my most deepest most unarticulated questions for myself through my writing in some form.
Now, I think of my writing as having two foundations: entertainment and meaning. The meaning portion is really me trying to answer my questions. The entertainment aspect of it is how I make a story that can make people turn the pages.
I wanted to write something that was very entertaining to read. The hardest part of this novel [The Yoga of Max's Discontent] was how to make a deeply spiritual transformation journey page-turning and adventurous. That was the hardest part to crack for me.
The whole idea is that the combination of tight activity and slack activity allows me to be both productive and creative at the same time. In the four years that I am actually working in a proper job, I am earning money and I'm also writing with a lot of discipline on the side.
I am just diving into life again. I just have nothing new to offer right now as an idea for a book. I feel like if I were to write something, I would probably repeat the same idea in a different story.
