A Young Man Gets 'Filthy Rich' Boiling, Bottling Tap Water
On using Lahore as the model for the typical global city in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
"For so long we've talked about 'the city' and we've used cities like New York or London as our template for our universal conversation about cities, and I was thinking, 'Well, maybe Lahore actually is quite typical of cities around the world now. Maybe I can use Lahore as a template for this global city.' And that's what I've tried to do. But in Lahore and many other places, you do see this collision between tradition and change, and so you have, on the one hand, the rise of all kinds of phenomena, whether it's illegal bars, gambling, protection rackets, immigrants, new sexual and moral and other values. At the same time you do have this persistence of older themes and older ways of organizing and thinking about a society where family is very important, where marriage is very important, where the bonds between people that come ancestrally and through marriage are vital. And those two systems are, to certain extent, in conflict, because we have this new market-based system that gets people to move away from their families and move to the city and start their new lives and, over time, abandon many of their initial values, but it doesn't fully satisfy."
On talking to immigration officials when traveling
"I've now been so many times that I think they recognize, they know who I am, and I guess they have some system that says, 'Oh, so you're a writer or whatever,' and oftentimes I don't know if this is just an [indication] of how prevalent creative writing has become in America, but at least twice I've had a question asking, 'So my son is thinking of doing an MFA program. You're a writer: Will it pay off?' or somebody else will say, 'This whole industry is getting taken over by a few publishers and retailers, and I've written a book and there's no way to break in.' There's some nice conversations that develop, but of course I would rather not be in that position in the first place."
On living in cities with a reputation for violence
"Violent cities, people who live in violent cities, find a way — as New Yorkers did 30 or 40 years ago — they find a way to just carry on. But you're stressed out. You're worried, you know. There's times when they, for example, will turn off all the cellphone service in Lahore and you can't make a phone call, because they're scared [that] on a particular religious holiday somebody will use a cellphone to detonate a bomb or coordinate a terrorist attack. You know, that's freaky when those things happen. In fact, once recently we had a hospital emergency where my father was unwell and we had to take him to hospital but we had no mobile phones. We couldn't call his doctor, you know. These things happen in daily life and, yeah, it's upsetting and unsettling."
“ Living in Pakistan now, I don't really care so much if somebody has extreme religious views. I just care if somebody believes in violence or not.