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Living In A Place Like Pakistan, Very Often You Meet People Who Are Migrating Abroad. And Sometimes You'll Ask Their Parents, You Know - You Didn't Try To Stop Them? Like, Why Didn't You Say, Don't Go - I'll Miss You? Stay With Me. And, You Know, People Say, Well, It's Best For Them. They Have To Go. And Parents, You Know, Take On That Sadness Because They Know It's Better For Their Children If They Leave.

-Mohsin Hamid

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Living In A Place

Mohsin Hamid

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Living In A Place Like Pakistan, Very Often You Meet People Who Are Migrating Abroad. And Sometimes You'll Ask Their Parents, You Know - You Didn't Try To Stop Them? Like, Why Didn't You Say, Don't Go - I'll Miss You? Stay With Me. And, You Know, People Say, Well, It's Best For Them. They Have To Go. And Parents, You Know, Take On That Sadness Because They Know It's Better For Their Children If They Leave.

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India And Pakistan

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All Over The World, The Nativist Perspective Is Being Privileged Over Those Who Are More Recent Arrivals.

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For Me, Writing A Novel Is Like Solving A Puzzle. But I Don't Intend My Novels As Puzzles. I Intend Them As Invitations To Dance.

My Earliest Memories Are Of Watching Star Trek And Mash While My Parents Barbecued Chicken In The Back Yard. I Was An American Kid, Through And Through.

Television Has Given Pakistan A Truly Open National Forum For The First Time In Its History. Ideas Are Debated, Leaders Are Assessed And Criticised, And A Nation Of 170 Million People Is Finally Discovering, Together, What It Thinks.

Only In Novels Can We Take Another Human Being Into Our Head And Create Something Jointly.

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Black And White

We Can Open Up Our Computers And Skype With Someone, And We See Them. It's Like Looking Through A Window. And We Can Surf The Internet Through Our Phones, And It's Like Our Consciousness Is Far Away. Or We Can Step Through A Airplane Door And Be In Another Continent A Few Hours Away. So Technology Feels, To Me, Like The Doors Sort Of Already Exist, At Least Emotionally.

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Transience Is What Is Normal. The Problem Is That We Are Busily Trying To Create Political Structures And Cultural Expressions That Deny That And To Deny That Is To Deny The Basic Idea Of What Is Human.

With Movement, Families Get Split. With The Politicization Of Religion, Spirituality Gets Diluted. With People Intermarrying And Falling In Love Outside Of Pre-existing Defined Groups, The Tribe Is Disappearing. I'm Not In Favor Of Going Back To Those Things, But You Can't Take Those Things Away Without Putting Something New In Its Place. So Finding A Way To Make Transience More Acceptable, Even Beautiful Is Key.

Falling In Love

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If We Try To 'protect Ourselves', Our Nation-states Begin To Look Like Prisons.

Islamophobia, In All Its Guises, Seeks To Minimise The Importance Of The Individual And Maximise The Importance Of The Group. Yet Our Instinctive Stance Ought To Be One Of Suspicion Towards Such Endeavours. For Individuals Are Undeniably Real. Groups, On The Other Hand, Are Assertions Of Opinion.

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I Come From An Enormous And Very Close Family. I Have Over A Dozen Aunts And Uncles In Pakistan, Dozens Of Cousins. I Have Many Close Friends. I Have Received So Much Love In Lahore That The City Always Pulls Me.

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Uncertain Future

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I Think Sometimes Feeling That You've Been Marginalized Opens You Up To The Realization That, In Their Own Lives, Almost Everyone Experiences Marginalization, A Kind Of Foreigner Sense.

It Is Remarkable Indeed How We Human Beings Are Capable Of Delighting In The Mating Call Of A Flower While We Are Surrounded By The Charred Carcasses Of Our Fellow Animals.

So In Many Ways, The Bombing At The End Of This Year And The Terrorist Attack Of Last Year In Peshawar Have Bookended Both Those Years In A Very Unfortunate Way. But At A Bigger Picture Since, The Impression In Pakistan Is That Things Are Actually Improving On The Terrorism Front Quite Dramatically.

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I Actually Feel That Personal Matters, Like Religion And Spirituality, Are Things That I Really Discuss Only With Intimates. I Think It's, In A Way, Like Sexuality, Something Where It Touches Upon Something Very Private.

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In America There Are People Advocating For Trans Rights And People Like Vice President Pence, Who Is Vehemently Opposed. In Pakistan, Too, You Have All Kinds Of Folks - From Flamboyant Gay Fashion Designers And Female Air Force Pilots To The Taliban. A Cross-dressed Man Used To Be The Top Tv Talk Show Host. It Was Actually Quite Radical. So The Diversity Of These Societies Is Often Lost On People.

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The Paralysis That We Have Right Now When We Think About Migration Is Partly Because We Can't Imagine What The World Would Look Like In The Future. So I Think It's Important For Writers And Artists To Try To Imagine That.

When I Travel, I Feel More Like A Nomad Than A Tourist.

The Ethnocultural Connotations Of The Burkini Ban Are Very Strong. It's As Absurd As Mandating That Women Have To Go Topless On The Beach. If I Were A Woman, I Definitely Would Not Want To Wear A Burkini Or A Headscarf. But It's Not About What I Want.

Sufi Poetry Is, In A Sense, Self-help Poetry About How To Live A Decent Life, How To Deal With Your Mortality.

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The Monolithic View That Many Americans Have Of Pakistani Culture Is As Inaccurate As The Monolithic View That Many Pakistanis Have Of American Culture.

American Culture

Chance Plays A Powerful Role In Every Life - Our Brains And Personalities Are Just Chemical Soup, After All; A Few Drops Here Or There Matter Enormously - But Consequences Often Become More Serious As Income Levels Go Down.

I Think Massive Migration Is Inevitable. As Sea Levels Rise, As Climate Change Happens, As Fertile Fields Become Arid, As Wars Are Fought, People Are Going To Move. They Always Have.

If Your Book Is Set In The Plantation Days Of The Slave-owning South And You Write A Little Romance Between Two Slave Owners Without Acknowledging The System They Live, That's A Political Gesture.

One Ought Not To Encourage Beggars, And Yes, You Are Right, It Is Far Better To Donate To Charities That Address The Causes Of Poverty Rather Than To Him, A Creature Who Is Merely Its Symptom.

I Think The Beard Helps Offset - It's The Only Hairstyle I Can Really Pull Off. But I'm Often Clean-shaven. I Think, You Know, For Me, It's Not That Signifier. What's Interesting To Me Though Is Although The Beard Isn't A Signifier Of That To Me, Other People Very Often Think That It Is. And So People In America Might React Differently. The, You Know, Border Agents Might React Differently. The Guys At Airport Security Might React Differently.

In A Way, Every Parent Is Sort Of Dependent On The Benevolence Of The Society Around Them To Take Care Of Their Children.

In Pakistan, Many Of The Young People Read Novels Because In The Novels, Not Just My Novels But The Novels Of Many Other Pakistani Writers, They Encounter Ideas, Notions, Ways Of Thinking About The World, Thinking About Their Society That Are Different. And Fiction Functions In A Countercultural Way As It Does In America And Certainly As It Did In The, You Know, '60s.

The Anger Is Useful Too Because When Things About The World Upset You, That Is Really A Fertile Feeling To Channel Into Fiction And To Put Out Into Books.

I Think The Idea Of Migration Through Time Is Very Important Because Every Human Being Does That And It Unites Us With People Who Migrate Through Geography.

What Did I Think Of Princeton? Well, The Answer To That Question Requires A Story. When I First Arrived, I Looked Around Me At The Gothic Buildings - Younger, I Later Learned, Than Many Of The Mosques Of This City, But Made Through Acid Treatment And Ingenious Stone-masonry To Look Older.

Capitalism Is Like The Law Of The Jungle With A Few Rules. There Isn't Another System That Works For Our Society But Left Unchecked, Capitalism Can Have A Dehumanising Effect.

Time Only Moves In One Direction. Remember That. Things Always Change.

It Seems An Obvious Thing To Say, But You Should Not Imagine That We Pakistanis Are All Potential Terrorists, Just As We Should Not Imagine That You Americans Are All Undercover Assassins.

Love Is Transient Even On A Very Personal Level. We Lose Everyone That We Love. Sometimes We Drift Apart And Sometimes We Die.

She Was Struggling Against A Current That Brought Her Inside Herself.

For If There Were A List Of Cosmic Things That Unite Us, Reader And Writer, Visible As It Scrolled Up Into The Distance, Like The Introduction To Some Epic Science-fiction Film, Then Shining Brightly On That List Would Be The Fact That We Exist In A Financial Universe That Is Subject To Massive Gravitational Pulls From States. States Tug At Us. States Bend Us. And, Tirelessly, States Seek To Determine Our Orbits.

I Think We Should Be Prepared, Given Environmental And Political Change For Large-scale Migration. If Sea Levels Rise And 200 Million People In Bangladesh And 300 Million People In Indonesia Need To Move, And The Entire Chinese Seaboard, New York City - That's Going To Be Huge.

I Am Not Much Of A Researcher As A Novelist; I Write Mainly From Experience.

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Many Boys, Probably Most Boys, Have A First Love Before They Fall In Love With A Woman. It Begins The Moment Two Boys Realize They'd Die For One Another, That Each Cares More For The Other Than He Does For Himself, And It Lasts Usually Until A Second Love Comes On The Scene, Because Most Hearts Aren't Big Enough To Love More Than One Person Like That.

Falling In Love

I Feel Engaged With Young People In Pakistan. But That Said, It's Still A Small Minority That Reads Novels, Literary Fiction. But It Isn't Necessarily A Small Minority Of The Wealthy Elite In The City Of Lahore. It Can Often Be And I Often Do Meet At Literary Festivals Students Who've Ridden A Bus 12 Hours From A Very Small Town Just To Hear Some Of Their Favorite Writers Come And Speak.

My Dad Had This Outlook: It Doesn't Matter What I Want To Read - Reading Was A Good Thing. So Whatever I Was Curious About They'd Get For Me From The Library. Books Were A Kind Of A Resistance To Reality. I Liked To Imagine Worlds That Were Different. I Still Do.

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I Did Not Grow Up In Poverty. But I Did Grow Up With A Poor Boy's Sense Of Longing, In My Case Not For What My Family Had Never Had, But For What We Had Had And Lost.

For Me, Language Is About The Impossibility Of Communicating What We Precisely Wish To Communicate And This Gorgeous Attempt That We Make To Do That Anyway. I Love That We Will Never Say Exactly What We Mean, But We Will Forever Keep Trying.

I Push Against The Tree And Run Away, Stumbling, The Unreal Night Playing With Me, Gravity Pulling From Below, Behind, Above, Making Me Fall. And I Run Through A World That Is Rotating, Conscious Of The Earth's Spin, Of Our Planet Twirling As It Careens Through Nothingness, Of The Stars Spiraling Above, Of The Uncertainty Of Everything, Even Ground, Even Sky. Mumtaz Never Calls Out, Although A Thousand And One Voices Scream In My Mind, Sing, Whisper, Taunt Me With Madness.

There's A Reason Prophets Perform Miracles; Language Lacks The Power To Describe Faith.

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India To Someone Who Lives In Lahore Is Like Queens To Someone Who Lives In Lower Manhattan - It's Not Far Away, And Yet It Doesn't Exist.

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We Need To Start Imagining The Future Or It Will Get Imagined For Us, And The Ways That It Has Been Imagined Thus Far Don't Seem Very Attractive.

Imagining The Future

When People, Particularly Young People And Especially Young Men, Can't Imagine Themselves As Heroes In Narratives That They Construct For Themselves, They Look To Be Heroes In Some Other Way. So Young Men In America Of, Let's Say, Muslim Background, Only A Tiny, Tiny Minority - So Small As To Be Almost Zero - Are Likely To Ever Commit Terrorist Acts.

When We Aren't Collectively Imagining Hopeful Futures, Then The Way Things Are Going Almost Invariably Seems Negative And Frightening.

The World Seems Concerned With Pakistan Primarily As An Actor In Global Attempts To Combat Terrorism.

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Walking Is Very Good For Writers. There's Something Fundamentally Useful About Not Talking To Anybody, Not Looking At A Screen, And Being In Nature - Even If That Nature Is An Urban Environment.

I Don't Listen To Music When I Write. I Need Silence So I Can Hear The Sound Of The Words.

You Know, Very Often, If You Look At The Kinds Of Communications That They're Getting In An Isis Recruiting Video, The Videos That, You Know, That One Hears Of As Radicalizing Them, These Are Like Action Movies. And So In The Sense, It's That By Closing Off The Idea That Young Muslims And Particularly Young Muslim Men Can Be American Heroes, It Increases The Chance That They'll Try To Be Some Other Kind Of Hero. And That, I Think, Is Entirely Counterproductive.

Yes, Manila Had Its Slums; One Saw Them On The Drive From The Airport: Vast Districts Of Men In Dirty White Undershirts Lounging Idly In Front Of Auto-repair Shops - Like A Poorer Version Of The 1950s America Depicted In Such Films As Grease.

Why The Brevity? Because I'd Rather People Read My Book Twice Than Only Half-way Through

Four Thousand Years Ago, We, The People Of The Indus River Basin, Had Cities That Were Laid Out On Grids And Boasted Underground Sewers, While The Ancestors Of Those Who Would Invade And Colonize America Were Illiterate Barbarians.

It's In Being Read That A Book Becomes A Book, And In Each Of A Million Different Readings A Book Become One Of A Million Different Books . . .

Literature Helps Us Transcend Ourselves.

You Know, You Get A Bad Review As A Writer, You Remember It For 10 Years. You Get A Hundred Good Reviews, You Forget Them All. You Say Hello To A Hundred People In The City And It Doesn't Mean Anything To You. One Racist Comment Passes By, And It Sticks With You A Decade.

Walking Is A Meditative Act. It's So Rare That We Allow Ourselves Just To Be.

Pakistan Hasn't Been Cast In The Role Of... Interesting Cultural Place Or, You Know, Land Of Great Comedians.

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Funny Relationship

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But When You Read A Book, What You See Are Black Squiggles On Pulped Wood Or, Increasingly, Dark Pixels On A Pale Screen. To Transform These Icons Into Characters And Events, You Must Imagine. And When You Imagine, You Create.

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And Also I Think The Rise Of Other, You Could Say, Destinations For International Jihadis Mean That Pakistan Isn't Necessarily The Place Where People From All Over The World Who Want To Engage In These Activities Gravitate To. They're Going Now To Places Like Syria Or Yemen Libya, Elsewhere.

In Italian, The Word For Novel Is Romanzo, "the Romance." The English Is "novel" - Something New. Both Of Those Elements, Experimentation And Love, Are Fundamental To The Form.

A Reader Should Encounter Themselves In A Novel, I Think.

The Gun Of The Father Is Always The Undoing Of The Son.

And I Ask Myself What It Is About Me That Makes This Wonderful, Beautiful Woman Return. Is It Because I'm Pathetic, Helpless In My Current State, Completely Dependent On Her? Or Is It My Sense Of Humour, My Willingness To Tease Her, To Joke My Way Into Painful, Secret Places? Do I Help Her Understand Herself? Do I Make Her Happy? Do I Do Something For Her That Her Husband And Son Can't Do? Has She Fallen In Love With Me? As The Days Pass And I Continue To Heal, My Body Knitting Itself Back Together, I Begin To Allow Myself To Think That She Has.

Growing Up In Pakistan In The 1980s, I Lived In The Shadow Of A Tyrannical State.

I Think The Most Effective Forms Of Critique Are Ones That Establish A Common Ground For People To Occupy, And Then Appeal To The Best Nature Of People On That Common Ground.

Novel Writing Is The Slowest Art Form In The World. It Is Not A Sprint. It Is Not Even A Marathon. It Is A Series Of Marathons That Stretch Over And Over Across A Continent.

You're A Watchful Guy. You Know Where That Comes From?" I Shook My Head. "it Comes From Feeling Out Of Place," He Said. "believe Me. I Know.

The Ban On The Burkini, Which Is Basically A Wetsuit, Seems Particularly Ridiculous.

Artists Are In The Imagining/ Prototyping Business. Society Needs People To Be Out There Thinking Of What Might Be. That Cannot Be Something We Just Delegate To Politicians Or Technologists.

Oftentimes I Deliberately Put Ambiguity Into My Books So That... The Reader Is Left With An Echo Of: 'how Much Of This Was From Me?'

When The Machine Of A Human Being Is Turned On, It Seems To Produce A Protagonist, Just As A Television Produces An Image.

What Else Is Belief But Direction?

I Don't Think The Function Of Writing, At Least For Me As A Fiction Writer, Is To Say To People, "here's The Answer." It's Not An Op-ed.

Maybe We Are All Prospective Migrants. The Lines Of National Borders On Maps Are Artificial Constructs, As Unnatural To Us As They Are To Birds Flying Overhead. Our First Impulse Is To Ignore Them.

Americans Need To Educate Themselves, From Elementary School Onward, About What Their Country Has Done Abroad. And They Need To Play A More Active Role In Ensuring That What The United States Does Abroad Is Not Merely In Keeping With A Foreign Policy Elite's Sense Of Realpolitik But Also With The American Public's Own Sense Of American Values.

If You Have Ever, Sir, Been Through A Breakup Of A Romantic Relationship That Involved Great Love, You Will Perhaps Understand What I Experienced. There Is In Such Situations Usually A Moment Of Passion During Which The Unthinkable Is Said; This Is Followed By A Sense Of Euphoria At Finally Being Liberated; The World Seems Fresh As If Seen For The First Time Then Comes The Inevitable Period Of Doubt, The Desperate And Doomed Backpedaling Of Regret; And Only Later, Once Emotions Have Receded, Is One Able To View With Equanimity The Journey Through Which One Has Passed.

Living In A Place Like Pakistan, Very Often You Meet People Who Are Migrating Abroad. And Sometimes You'll Ask Their Parents, You Know - You Didn't Try To Stop Them? Like, Why Didn't You Say, Don't Go - I'll Miss You? Stay With Me. And, You Know, People Say, Well, It's Best For Them. They Have To Go. And Parents, You Know, Take On That Sadness Because They Know It's Better For Their Children If They Leave.

Religion Is Not Something I Like To Talk About Publicly. One Reason Is The Politics, But Also I Think Spirituality Is Deeply Personal.

Writing A Novel Is Like An Amusement Park Or A Museum Or A City. You Go Into That Place And You Have Certain Experiences And Those Experiences, Hopefully, Have Some Impact On You.

We're All United In This, That Every Human Being Migrates Through Time, That The Place We Grew Up In In Our Childhood Is Gone When We're In Our 50s And 60s And 70s.

America's Strength Has Made It A Sort Of Gulliver In World Affairs: By Wiggling Its Toes It Can, Often Inadvertently, Break The Arm Of A Lilliputian.

For Many People, There Is An Almost Power To Be Found In Prayer.

Farmers And People Who Make A Living From The Land Are Finding It Impossible To Survive. So The First Step Is To Get Out Of That Place. Come To The City Where There Are Opportunities.

I Think Fiction Allows You To Inhabit New Domains And It's You, The Reader Living In That Domain For A Few Days That Results In A Deeper Understanding As Opposed To The Novel Proclaiming This Is What It Is Right And This Is What Is Wrong.

Some Of My Relatives Held On To Imagined Memories The Way Homeless People Hold Onto Lottery Tickets. Nostalgia Was Their Crack Cocaine, If You Will, And My Childhood Was Littered With The Consequences Of Their Addiction : Unserviceable Debts, Squabbles Over Inheritances, The Odd Alcoholic Or Suicide.

I Took A Couple Of Creative Writing Classes With Joyce Carol Oates At Princeton University, And In My Senior Year There, I Took A Long Fiction Workshop With Toni Morrison. I Fell In Love With It.

We Need A Self Because The Complexity Of The Chemical Processes That Make Up Our Individual Humanities Exceeds The Processing Power Of Our Brains.

And With A Last Stardrop, A Last Circle, I Arrive, And She's There, Chemical Wonder In Her Eyes.

If Differences Can Be Hidden, Perhaps They Aren't Differences At All.

The Ruins Proclaim The Building Was Beautiful.

I Think That People Are Going To Move. They Always Have And That's Going To Continue. The Question Is, How Are We Going To Deal With It?

The Fruits Of Labor Are Delicious, But Individually They’re Not Particularly Fattening. So Don’t Share Yours, And Munch On Those Of Others Whenever You Can.

I Would Have Bet Money That Britain Would Not Vote To Leave The Eu, And I Would Have Been Wrong. I Would Have Bet Money That Trump Would Not Have Been The Republican Nominee, And I Would Have Been Wrong And I Certainly Would Have Bet Money That He Wouldn't Win The Election.

I Think Walking Is Very Useful, Like Sleeping And Dreaming, As Something That's Important To My Ability To Write.

Like Many Of My Friends In The Pakistani Diaspora - And Many Of My Friends In Pakistan Itself, For That Matter - I Have Sometimes Looked At The Country Of My Birth And Wondered Whether Its Future Will Be One Of Steady And Sad Decline.

You Can Live In The Same City Your Entire Life And Still Be Completely A Foreigner When You Step Out, In Your Old Age, Onto The Street.

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Jacqueline Bisset

Honore De Balzac

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