How Karan Mahajan Paid the Bills While He Wrote the Books
“I was still being a responsible Indian kid getting a monetizable degree from an American university.”
Karan Mahajan’s second novel, The Association of Small Bombs, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Mahajan has worked as a cricket editor for a sports website and a consultant on economic and urban planning. Here’s how he made ends meet.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Medium: As a child, what did “going to work” look like to you?
Karan Mahajan: I had a pretty standard bourgeois idea of the man going off with a mysterious set of papers that no one in the family would see. When I was five or seven, I would take sheets of paper and walk to the driveway with my red plastic Lego briefcase and pretend that I was going to the office. I must’ve picked that up from my dad. Mom had been a lecturer in English at Delhi University, but after she got married and went to the U.S., she was a homemaker.
Was there anyone modeling an artist’s life?
The idea that someone could be a full-time writer — just leave college and say, “I’m going to be an artist” — was…
