e. cultural, historical, geological context of the text

EG Did you go to school in Bombay? Did you experience the kind of disdain the narrator did in The Cripple and his Talismans and the kind of inability to fit in? Could you tell us about your background?

AI Yes, I was schooled in Bombay. The restaurant Lucky Moon, I think it's mentioned in the book, was where we'd hang out all the time, and I did have a group of friends who were the class "toughies." They had a wonderful sense of humor, and they had mastered sarcasm and had a great sense of timing. What I brought to it was a sense of the absurd. From a very young age, I learned how to laugh at the darkest of human experiences. I have no idea why, but it came very naturally to me.

It's not that I didn't fit in, but I carried a certain amount of cynicism with me all through my education. Even though I did really well in school, I didn't get the point. I had no desire to amount to anything--no doctor, no engineer, nothing. Instead, I made sure I did well in my exams just so that I could say it was meaningless. I'm not saying education is meaningless. I'm saying that from a very early age I was searching for something. When I look back now, I guess it was to find my purpose--to write. But my schooling did not teach me how to write. The streets of Bombay did.

http://www.eclectica.org/v10n3/glixman_irani.html