I left India when I was seventeen years old and spent two years in boarding school in the US. Then I went to college there and even spent some time in Eastern Europe after that, actually. I travelled to Romania, where I had earned myself a fellowship and from there, back westwards to England for my doctoral studies. I grew up in Puducherry in the Auroville Ashram. Even as a child I was acutely aware of how different it was from the rest of India. Auroville was an international and cosmopolitan space with a global community of people. It was also, to use a lose term, ‘westernised’. The rest of India was less open to the world in the seventies and the eighties. When I was young, I would often travel to visit my extended and very scattered family at Udaipur, Mumbai and Delhi. At the time, those places were even more diverse and different from what they are today. I knew that my home in Puducherry was more special, especially then. The decision to leave India at the age of 17 was mostly educationally driven. The schools in Puducherry, especially the schools in Auroville, were exceptional. However, they were very different in their structure – while growing up I was in no rat race to get better grades, as there were no grades awarded to students; it was a holistic educational background. There was an emphasis on liberal arts. Part of my family lived in the US, so my family decided to put me into a boarding school there to give my education a sort of structure. Even while I was there, I would come back home frequently. Though I was in a foreign land at the time, India was not too far from my thoughts and I knew that one day I would be back. So the decision to return was not one taken overnight. What started happening around 2000 or so were a couple of things: India was changing and was becoming a much more open, exciting and dynamic place to be. I do not mean exciting only in terms of the material opportunities, but also intellectually stimulating. There is so much life here. That, combined with the feeling of flatness in the west, particularly the US, prompted me towards the decision. I remember being in the US when the Iraq War broke out. And I remember thinking to myself that I did not wish to be a part of this imperial decline. The war was the most specific thing that helped me to make this final decision, in a way – why would I live in a country where so much was messed up? I did not think of going anywhere else (so-called ‘first world’ countries) because the point was to come back home. At that time my family and I were living in New York. We had initial hesitations about coming back to a slower lifestyle because at NYC we were so used to a dynamic social life. We pondered over the choice of staying in a city, say a Bengaluru for instance, but then soon dropped the idea. The intention was to live free under the open skies and have a certain quality of life in India. Both my wife and I were partly raised in Auroville, so we were inclined towards unlimited and clean space. I grew up on the edge of a forest, walked on unpaved streets and breathed in fresh air every day. We could walk to the beach when we wanted to. If we had to have it, we wanted the older ways. So we thought about coming back to Bengaluru–I find larger Indian cities very challenging. My book doesn't talk about Auroville or Punducherry, but I do talk of my life and living in the middle of nature, which leads to introspection, inner peace. For better or for worse, there's much less to do in the semiurban and rural spaces. t6There are no urban trappings such as a mall or a hangout spaces and as a result, one feels freer at some level. I think that nature has a calming effect on the human soul. For a writer, Puducherry was perfect. I am surrounded by people who are very environmentally conscious; they work on the land and pioneer green development in India. In this day and age, Auroville is like an oasis and an inspirational place to stay in. We were all struggling to come to terms with a new place in the first few months after we came back. Anytime you start something new, it is exciting and yet there is a fear and a struggle to get into the pace. When I came back, India was in a much more euphoric state and I was more tuned to the positive aspects of the country. Something had changed in the very spirit of the country. India was infused with an energy, a can-do ambition and an entrepreneurial spirit - at least that is how it appeared to me at the time. As it is now, that euphoric feeling has been bogged down by the realism of staying in a country. But even now, though I see the struggle clearly, I still see the spirit of survival just as well. Today, the honeymoon may be over, but the love has been reinforced. My book is what you call narrative non-fiction, which is a result of my family's move from New York City to Puducherry. Some people might call it literary non-fiction, but literary is a big, pretentious word and I would rather not use it. The book is a result of my struggle to understand a country which is complex and confusing. It is an attempt to tell true stories and real-life matters, rather than give policies, arguments or statistics, which ultimately leave much more unsaid. In NYC I was really close to the commercial side of the writing business, which was not so uplifting or inspiring for me as a writer. When I moved back to India, I initially thought that I would abandon the pen. However, when you are back there is so much happening in your head. I wanted to understand what was going on, within and outside me. I realised that things were far more complicated than I had thought they would be. Writing and research were tools to engage with my country and understand it; that was the impetus behind the book. I was very clear from the beginning that when I would write the book, I wanted to understand India through its people and its stories. Partly, it was because I find narratives far more engaging than any other form of writing, and partly because I think what was being written about India were the broadly economic, policy and academic books. Because they are so broad-based, they missed out on the nuances and complexities of the day-to-day living of the country. There is nothing more complex than a life and when you focus on it, you really get into the ups and downs and the ambivalence of what is going on in the country right now. If you compare a macroeconomic figure like a GDP indicator to a life, the latter has so many layers and thereby can give so much more information than just a figure. Now I have this information, do I wish to do something more about so-called ‘saving’ Auroville, which has been so pristine all this while? Yes and no. I don't see the book as an implement of activism. And I believe that even in civil life there is always that need to stand up for what is right. What happens in India (and perhaps all across the world), is that citizens become mini-activists in their backyards by accident. Everyone who I have known has engaged in some level of activism against things that need to be prevented or things that needed to be done. For example, I have been talking about the garbage problem in the area where I stay. Of how one night my family woke up to the smell of burning rubbish which choked our son and made him ill for the better part of the night. I spoke up about that issue, not as a writer but as a person who was affected by a problem. The writing comes out of the citizenship, rather than the citizenship coming out of the writing, if you know what I mean.