Amitav Ghosh

I am not that kind of writer at all.

And I do know that as one writes, strange things happen.

It's really also so unpredictable.

I mean, you think of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

For more than a decade, he wrote nothing.

But at the same time, he just prepared and prepared and prepared.

And then suddenly, in a very short spurt, he wrote his great masterpiece, The Duino Elegies.

And I think there are just so many examples of that kind of thing, you know.

that one really can't dismiss it out of hand.

With this book, Ghost Eye, really I felt like it was writing itself.

Usually it takes me years and years to write a novel.

But with this one, it was just literally just writing itself.

I suppose in the research on past life memories, one thing that really stands out a lot

is that children who are born with these past life memories, many of their memories are very powerfully tied to food.

So there are children in Burma who have past life memories of being Japanese soldiers

And they won't eat Burmese food.

They want raw fish.

They want, you know, very bland Japanese food.

But it happens most of all in India.

Because often in India, various communities have different dietary kinds of rules and regulations and so on.