Karan Bajaj Quotes

#1. Love was for dummies, soulmates were the creation of pulp-fiction writers; romance was craved by ageing, lonely cat owners. Successful relationships were built on rationality and compromise.

Karan Bajaj

#2. There is no absolute truth that the guy sitting in the cave in the Himalayas is useless, because he is at that point in his journey where he has experienced everything in the world and does not have an attraction to it anymore.

Karan Bajaj

#3. I did not have any philosophy at all when I wrote the first novel. I was just wanting to capture experiences that I thought would be inspiring for Indians who are trying to break free from the very high-pressured family environments and do their own thing.

Karan Bajaj

#4. The first novel that I wrote was because I was having very interesting sorts of experiences, for Indians of my generation.

Karan Bajaj

#5. I don't think of the ashram world as being any more spiritual than the corporate world.

Karan Bajaj

#6. Somebody who is purified with life enough would be able to read your feeling before it becomes a word in your mouth. It is not very hard to understand - and you meet people like that. Almost everything is very factual and scientific and not exaggerated.

Karan Bajaj

#7. What I'm trying to do right now is truly answer my most deepest most unarticulated questions for myself through my writing in some form.

Karan Bajaj

#8. What helped me a lot was that I chose an American lead protagonist, because that liberated a lot from my own knowledge. If I had approached it from the perspective of an Indian main character, I think I would have assumed a lot of knowledge and I would have resented the presence of the author.

Karan Bajaj

#9. Here are two dichotomies here. In the West it is a very physical practice, and even meditation is a practice to become productive and more at peace. In the East, you think of the deep spiritual practices as a journey of complete dissolution of the self, the ego.

Karan Bajaj

#10. I am just diving into life again. I just have nothing new to offer right now as an idea for a book. I feel like if I were to write something, I would probably repeat the same idea in a different story.

Karan Bajaj

#11. I think nothing, at an objective level, is either right or wrong.

Karan Bajaj

#12. The whole world's problems are caused by man's inability to sit quietly by himself in a room.

Karan Bajaj

#13. I think it is really a personal journey of purification, rather than whether something external is going to be good or bad. Anything external will always live in that polarity - a combination of good and bad.

Karan Bajaj

#14. I think his karma became to serve in nature and not to serve in the world, while I think my karma is to be in the world.

Karan Bajaj

#15. There are people like me who are not there yet, who are still the eagle flying high right now, still experiencing more in the world and growing as a result of that - and that is my journey.

Karan Bajaj

#16. Almost every yogi that appeared in the book [The Yoga of Max's Discontent] is either somebody I have seen and met and spoken to, or someone who is in my three degrees of separation - I know the source who talks to me about it so well that I believe his story.

Karan Bajaj

#17. The whole idea is that the combination of tight activity and slack activity allows me to be both productive and creative at the same time. In the four years that I am actually working in a proper job, I am earning money and I'm also writing with a lot of discipline on the side.

Karan Bajaj

#18. When I started, these [yoga] were very functional practices, as I said, productive to lose weight, or whatever, and now it has become a very spiritual kind of practice.

Karan Bajaj

#19. If I was a complete slacker who was just doing nothing but traveling, I don't know if I would have the discipline to be productive and create this job, and on the other hand, if I was always disciplined and productive, I don't think I would have that mystical connection that lead to great work.

Karan Bajaj

#20. I am the seeker, the act of seeking, and the one who is sought.

Karan Bajaj

#21. I have been meditating for many years now, but I think for quite a few years my relationship with meditation was very intellectual. I would do meditation for all the usual things that you would think about, to be more calm, be more productive, relieve stress.

Karan Bajaj

#22. What has happened in most of my books is the call to the extraordinary world, the hero's push, or that push has come to him.

Karan Bajaj

#23. All mountain people are like that. No matter where you go, the mountains call you back.

Karan Bajaj

#24. I wanted to write something that was very entertaining to read. The hardest part of this novel [The Yoga of Max's Discontent] was how to make a deeply spiritual transformation journey page-turning and adventurous. That was the hardest part to crack for me.

Karan Bajaj

#25. There is a role for growth and experiencing the world, and pushing the boundaries of that, and then there is a time to bring it within. All people are at different stages of that journey.

Karan Bajaj

#26. Man's soul cries for the infinite in a finite world. That's why nothing ever satisfies us.

Karan Bajaj

#27. I don't know if there is really an objective truth about either. I liken this to what Buddhism says about the individual, that change starts with the individual. I think it is really about purifying your own actions, and I have seen that in my own life.

Karan Bajaj

#28. I see the faces that stop by my cart here. Their smiles are hollow, their eyes are hungry. The yogi's faces are different. Silent, complete. Like the mountains around them. Asking no questions, seeking no answers, just certain, as though they knew exactly who they were.

Karan Bajaj

#29. When I started on the path, too, I really thought I would become a yogi in a cave, but I didn't have clarity about my path. When I evolved in the ashram for six months, I learned a lot, but I realized that it was not my natural state of being. So, I came back to the world.

Karan Bajaj

#30. Now, I think of my writing as having two foundations: entertainment and meaning. The meaning portion is really me trying to answer my questions. The entertainment aspect of it is how I make a story that can make people turn the pages.

Karan Bajaj

#31. It's not time that is passing by after all, it's you and I

Karan Bajaj

#32. I think meditation became truly a means to a deeper connection as I was searching for a deeper truth within myself. Meditation became almost more spiritual than material in nature over the last two or three years and it has deepened a lot as a result of that.

Karan Bajaj

#33. What I need to do is to just deepen my well. I'm just experiencing life now.

Karan Bajaj

#34. In the first 27 years of my life, I never had written a single non-technical word. I went to engineering college and went to business school. I never knew I could write fiction of any form.

Karan Bajaj