India, Nov. 14 -- 1You loved reading John Berger and you wrote a book on him, Ways of Telling. What was it like to meet him? At that stage, I'd met very few writers. I loved literature. I wanted to be a writer myself. And they were sort of mythic figures, so naturally, I wanted to meet them. I just feel so lucky that Berger was the first. He was my favourite writer too, and he happened to be the first great writer I met. His behaviour was so exemplary that I feel it set a standard for my own behaviour. In a way, something about his writing made me particularly interested in him because of the values that he espoused in his books. It would have been particularly disappointing if he had been less than wonderful. I still like to meet people, but I could draw up a list for you, which I won't, of dreadful writers whom I hope never to see again. Fortunately, there's an equally long list of writers with whom I have now become friends. 2Satire creates an equal space where all sides can laugh at the joke made at their expense. Is this why you have provocative titles for your works, such as Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It? Well, you say provocative, but I'd say seductive or alluring. There's another title, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, which was to really signal that it's a version of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. Titles must have some kind of gravitational pull to them, of course, so I'd say they are seductive in their invitation. 3Tell us about your memoir, Homework. I didn't have a contract with the publisher, but I had a contract with the form, if you like, a covenant, to be as accurate as I could, and not to invent things that didn't happen. Then, we come to the thing of little details. And I found that I didn't actually need to invent them because after a certain time of concentrating and working on a scene, details would come back to me. Ever since the book has come out, I have realised that several such details, as it turns out, I have gotten wrong. But I won't be changing them in the text because they are an accurate reflection of what I thought was the case. I'm just going to add a little postscript to the paperback, explaining certain things that I've remembered incorrectly, though I was trying to be as reliable a witness as I could. 4As a writer, you've forayed into a variety of genres. For me, genres don't really exist; it's all just writing. Certain things, like the reliability of a text, can alter emphasis, but it's all writing for me. 5Self-analysis has a role to play when one is working on a novel. Do you tend to analyse what you're writing? Whenever a book of mine comes to people like my agent or editors, they have some useful sort of input, but I feel that my own capacity for self-editing and self-criticism is quite highly developed, so I don't feel I need as big a team of helpers as some writers might....