India's great economic boom, the arrival of the Internet and outsourcing, have broken the wall between provincial India and the world.

Like most people who live in India, I complain about corruption, but know that I can live with corrupt men. It is the honest ones I secretly worry about.

In my family, as in most middle-class Indian families I knew when I was growing up, science and mathematics were held in awe.

I had grown up in a privileged, upper-caste Hindu community; and because my father worked for a Catholic hospital, we lived in a prosperous Christian neighborhood.

I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.

When I was writing 'The White Tiger' I lived in a building pretty much exactly like the one I described in this novel, and the people in the book are the people I lived with back then. So I didn't have to do much research to find them.

Columbia University, where I went to study in 1993, insisted its undergraduates learn a foreign language, so I discovered French.

If we were in India now, there would be servants standing in the corners of this room and I wouldn't notice them. That is what my society is like, that is what the divide is like.

In India, it's the rich who have problems with obesity. And the poor are darker-skinned because they work outside and often work without their tops on so you can see their ribs.