Bharati Mukherjee

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'm very moved by chaos theory, and that sense of energy. That quantum physics. We don't really, in Hindu tradition, have a father figure of a God. It's about cosmic energy, a little spark of which is inside every individual as the soul.

'Modesty Blaise' is not well known in the United States, but in the United Kingdom, she's an institution - especially for a comic book reader of a certain age. She's a wonderful creation, and her strip ran in newspapers for a long time. So whenever female spies come to mind for us, they think of 'Modesty Blaise'.