33+ Karan Mahajan Quotes On Karma, Immigration And Self And Creative

Karan Mahajan is an Indian-American novelist. He is the author of the novels The Association of Small Bombs and The Sympathizer, which won the 2016 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His most recent novel, Family Planning, was published in 2020. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Karan Mahajan on karma, life, love.

Top 10 Karan Mahajan Quotes

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. I also think that there's something about the graphic, political nature of such attacks, mixed with the fact that it all seems completely random to the victims.
6. It's very good for us to say, as liberals, that we should be moved by everything, but the fact is that there's just so much competing for our attention.
7. How do you prevent attacks from becoming the very fabric of lived life in a city? Of course it's very easy to say you should be fearless and go about your daily life.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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 Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

I don't think sexual repression leads to violence, but I can see the situation where you're trying very hard to be very religious and to be good but pornography exerts a strong force on you, and one way to get further away from it would be to immerse yourself in a strong religious system. — Karan Mahajan

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

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

But I think the goal of all these attacks is the same, which is to seize maximum media attention. Maybe some of these attacks were meant to be small. Some of them might have been failed larger attacks. And some of them are just part of a new strategy of doing lots of tiny attacks, as opposed to one large one. — Karan Mahajan

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

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

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

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

terrorism is interesting to a novelist because it's a crime that's driven by an idea, as opposed to some kind of base materialist impulse. It's not like stealing from someone's house, or even assassinating someone. There are very complex ideological reasons behind these almost abstract acts of violence. — Karan Mahajan

I'm interested in the way that terror is almost a psychosomatic state. You may have suffered a small injury for a few seconds, but the rest of the year you're constantly on the alert, your injury is constantly with you - and I mean this on a city-wide scale. — Karan Mahajan

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

It's amazing to me in retrospect that I wrote as much as I did with full-time jobs. Each city gave me a new distance from - and a new way of looking at - India. I'm grateful for the movement. I feel as if I've crammed several lives into one. — Karan Mahajan

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

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

When a bomb actually goes off, there's a lot of confusion, and people often don't know a bomb has gone off. For a long time, people might think there's been an electrical malfunction or something else that's exploded. — Karan Mahajan

It's easier to set off a bomb that kills innocent civilians in a market than it is to plot an assassination, but that obviously was true before as well. I also think it's now easier to get attention for a small attack that goes off in a random market. It's almost like there's a marketplace for terror in the media, and these people are supplying the attacks, knowing that the media will cover them sensationally. — Karan Mahajan

You can say that a small attack is one in which relatively few people die, but the minute you say that, you can sense the ironies in that statement. A blast in which five people are killed is a meaningful blast. — Karan Mahajan

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

People in the East get a very skewed sense of America as this enormously rapaciously sexual place, this place where you have rappers and you have Donald Trump and things like that, which leads to a lot of confusion. — Karan Mahajan

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

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

Literature has become too psychological. We discount the physical, when in fact much of life is physical. People's personalities are partly formed by, or in response to, how they take up space; the physical mask has some relation, howsoever obscure, to the mental work happening underneath. — Karan Mahajan

Life Lessons by Karan Mahajan

1. Karan Mahajan's work teaches us to be open-minded and to embrace the complexity of the world around us. His stories often explore the nuances of identity, culture, and belonging, emphasizing the importance of understanding our own perspectives and those of others.
2. His novels also demonstrate the power of storytelling to connect us to our own histories and to each other, and to provide insight into the human experience.
3. Through his work, Mahajan encourages us to think deeply about the world around us and to strive for a more compassionate and understanding society.