India is for me a difficult country. It isn’t my home and cannot be my home; and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only… - V. S. Naipaul

One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas — and you have to work through it all.

It [Islam] has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter'... This abolition of the self demanded by Muslims was worse than the similar colonial abolition of identity. It is much, much worse in fact... You cannot just say you came out of nothing.

But the people I found, the people I was attracted to were not unlike myself. They were trying to find order in their world, looking for the centre..