Karan Bajaj Quotes
-
Journeys become very good metaphors. They always have the character put into circumstances that reveal him. If I had based my characters in New York and had them just sitting and thinking about life, it would be like what contemporary U.S. fiction is about. That is very heavy, literally, for me. It doesn't become mainstream enough because the pages don't turn themselves.
→ -
I have been meditating for many years now, but I think for quite a few years my relationship with meditation was very intellectual. I would do meditation for all the usual things that you would think about, to be more calm, be more productive, relieve stress.
→ -
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.
→ -
If I was a complete slacker who was just doing nothing but traveling, I don't know if I would have the discipline to be productive and create this job, and on the other hand, if I was always disciplined and productive, I don't think I would have that mystical connection that lead to great work.
→ -
I think his karma became to serve in nature and not to serve in the world, while I think my karma is to be in the world.
→ -
There is a role for growth and experiencing the world, and pushing the boundaries of that, and then there is a time to bring it within. All people are at different stages of that journey.
→ -
The first novel that I wrote was because I was having very interesting sorts of experiences, for Indians of my generation.
→ -
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.
→ -
What helped me a lot was that I chose an American lead protagonist, because that liberated a lot from my own knowledge. If I had approached it from the perspective of an Indian main character, I think I would have assumed a lot of knowledge and I would have resented the presence of the author.
→ -
I don't know if there is really an objective truth about either. I liken this to what Buddhism says about the individual, that change starts with the individual. I think it is really about purifying your own actions, and I have seen that in my own life.
→ -
I did not have any philosophy at all when I wrote the first novel. I was just wanting to capture experiences that I thought would be inspiring for Indians who are trying to break free from the very high-pressured family environments and do their own thing.
→ -
When I started, these [yoga] were very functional practices, as I said, productive to lose weight, or whatever, and now it has become a very spiritual kind of practice.
→ -
The moment you enter Bhutan, you notice that there are no traffic lights. It is almost like you've stepped into a Shangri-La or a vortex of time 200 years ago. Those kinds of experiences are very much of the countryside of Bhutan, where people are truly happy in the sense of not creating and wanting more.
→ -
What has happened in most of my books is the call to the extraordinary world, the hero's push, or that push has come to him.
→ -
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.
→ -
The concept of karma is a beautiful concept in Sanskrit. The whole idea of karma is that every being has an innate tendency - the karma of ice is to be cold, the karma of fire is to burn, the karma of the trees is to grow and bear fruit. In the same way, a human has a certain thrust. What I've realized is that my thrust is to be in the world, like in the world of business.
→ -
In the year that I take off, I don't have any goals. I just surrender to experiences like traveling or learning yoga and meditation or just living in a completely random place like Mongolia or Portugal or Bhutan. Then when I come back, I am much more intuitive, creative, right-brained. That kind of system has been working very well for me.
→ -
Almost every yogi that appeared in the book [The Yoga of Max's Discontent] is either somebody I have seen and met and spoken to, or someone who is in my three degrees of separation - I know the source who talks to me about it so well that I believe his story.
→ -
A lot of the book [The Yoga of Max's Discontent] is about karma and rebirth. Things like that are very attuned to my life as an Indian, but when I approach it from a perspective of a Westerner, then I have a skeptical, yet kind of novice view on it. I think that choice really liberated the story to be its own story. A lot of the conclusions that Max reaches on his own are not mine at all. So, I think that allowed the story to take on its own momentum, to have its own propulsive force.
→ -
My wife and I took a sabbatical and we went from Europe to India, where we lived in an ashram for six months and did meditation and yoga vigorously, like from 5:00 in the morning until 10:00 in the night in very austere circumstances. I think then my practice became less superficial, more like the traditional definition of what meditation was: to truly find oneness.
→ -
In the yoga sutras, they have this beautiful analogy that the journey of life is like the flight of an eagle, or the journey over multiple lifetimes is like a flight of an eagle. First, the eagle stretches its wings high, high, high, and experiences everything that the world has to offer in terms of flight. It's growing and flying and it's experiencing, and then it brings its wings down gracefully and that is the completion of the journey.
→ -
There is no absolute truth that the guy sitting in the cave in the Himalayas is useless, because he is at that point in his journey where he has experienced everything in the world and does not have an attraction to it anymore.
→ -
Somebody who is purified with life enough would be able to read your feeling before it becomes a word in your mouth. It is not very hard to understand - and you meet people like that. Almost everything is very factual and scientific and not exaggerated.
→ -
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.
→ -
Here are two dichotomies here. In the West it is a very physical practice, and even meditation is a practice to become productive and more at peace. In the East, you think of the deep spiritual practices as a journey of complete dissolution of the self, the ego.
→ -
I think nothing, at an objective level, is either right or wrong.
→ -
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 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.
→ -
When I started on the path, too, I really thought I would become a yogi in a cave, but I didn't have clarity about my path. When I evolved in the ashram for six months, I learned a lot, but I realized that it was not my natural state of being. So, I came back to the world.
→ -
I think it is really a personal journey of purification, rather than whether something external is going to be good or bad. Anything external will always live in that polarity - a combination of good and bad.
→
Related Authors
-
Sidney Sheldon Writer -
Faraaz Kazi Author -
Gregory David Roberts Author -
Winston Groom Novelist -
John Burdett Novelist -
Upamanyu Chatterjee Author
Popular Topics
- Enough
- Quick Change
- Honor
- Aerospace
- Best Poet
- Spiritual Inspiration
- Air Force One
- Studying Philosophy
- Great Gatsby Love
- Critical Mass
- Inspirational Book
- Volunteers Making A Difference
- Svengali
- Secret To Happiness
- Picnic Baskets
- Business Problems
- Sound Advice
- Jobless
- Thankful For Friends
- Perfect Night