How has globalisation changed the scenario in India, especially your experience of being a writer using English?
I think IT has had an enormously liberating impact in the last 20 years. I think it has incorporated an entirely new class of people into the upper middle-class. They are not people who grew up going to clubs or top boarding schools. They are lower middle-class people who studied hard, worked hard, who made their way up to that class through the route of using their minds. You can see that when you go to any major university and meet the young people there. I am not saying it is a complete meritocracy because obviously the peasant child cannot make his way up. But certainly the upper peasantry, the rural landed people, they are very much represented within this group and it is a sea change in Indian life. Basically the IT people are people who grew up in a world of ideas. That’s the enormous difference between them and the old Indian elite… and it’s resulted in a level of empowerment which is staggering. As a writer I see the difference. It’s a completely different experience to be a
