Dullness Is A Kind Of Luxury.

There Was No Audience For My Books. The Indians Didn't Regard Me As An Indian And North Americans Couldn't Conceive Of Me Of A North American Writer, Not Being White And Brought Up On Wheat Germ. My Fiction Got Lost.

One Of The Early Tip-offs To Me About The Enormous Changes That Were Going On With Being In A Bangalore House, Home, Where The Young Woman From A Nearby Village, Who Had Been Hired To Baby Sit Newborn Twins, Suddenly Said After Two Weeks Of Work: 'i'm Sorry, This Is Too Much Work, I'm Going To Try Applying For Call Center Jobs. The Pay Is Better.'

Mother Teresas Detractors Have Accused Her Of Overemphasizing Calcuttans Destitution And Of Coercing Conversion From The Defenseless. In The Context Of Lost Causes, Mother Teresa Took On Battles She Knew She Could Win. Taken Together, It Seems To Me, The Criticisms Of Her Work Do Not Undermine Or Topple Her Overall Achievement.

Bengalis Love To Celebrate Their Language, Their Culture, Their Politics, Their Fierce Attachment To A City That Has Been Famously Dying For More Than A Century. They Resent With Equal Ferocity The Reflex Stereotyping That Labels Any Civic Dysfunction Anywhere In The World 'another Calcutta.'

I Flew Into A Small Airport Surrounded By Cornfields And Pastures, Ready To Carry Out The Two Commands My Father Had Written Out For Me The Night Before I Left Calcutta: Spend Two Years Studying Creative Writing At The Iowa Writers Workshop, Then Come Back Home And Marry The Bridegroom He Selected For Me From Our Caste And Class.