Dan Brown in the ring...

You've come to India 19 years since your first visit. How changed do you find it?
The first obvious response to that would be that it is much more densely populated than it was (Laughs) Its much more industrialised, its grown enormously... As for me the biggest change is that I've come back with an enormous fascination for religion. I'm particularly taken by Hinduism which I used to think is a religion but now I'm increasingly convinced its a way of life... a philosophy.

You said in reply to a question soon after your talk on religion and science that its very likely Robert Langdon could visit Mumbai in you next. Were you just saying that?
(Laughs) You know honestly, I really don't know about the next book. It will take me some time to learn about India, its philosophy and religion here to write about it. I don't know enough to presume anything, but I'm learning, so let's see...

Few authors are published in 52 languages around the world with 200 million copies in print. Yet many feel when it comes to books, the popular is not necessarily congruous with the good. Your thoughts.
You know I just write the book I would want to read. I let my taste guide me and hope that others share my taste. Some do... I'd say a lot do. They are my fans and some don't. They are my critics and that's okay.

Explain you fascination with treasure hunts on tight deadline which your books are known for along with keys, symbols, codes and cryptography.
As a kid on Christmas morning, the Christian tradition is that you come down the stairs and there are presents under the Christmas tree. But in my family we'd come down and there'd be a code in an envelope and we'd have to solve it. It'd maybe say, go to the kitchen and look in the refrigerator and you would look there and there'd be another code that might say go to the bathroom and look in the shower. So we'd run all over the house following codes and then we get back to the tree, to find all the presents there. So for me treasure hunts and codes were always fun and I try to being some of that fun into my books too. Yes my books are about serious topics but I want readers to have fun while they are learning.

You were seriously pursuing a career in music. Have you given it up completely?
No I still play and write music everyday. I play the piano. I just don't try to make a living out of it because (Laughs) I'm not very good at it apparently.

Has being a teacher helped you become a better writer?
Well these novels of mine are designed to entertain but also to teach and the best teachers make learning fun because you don't realise you're learning. And of course my lead character is a professor and he's somebody who is intellectually curious. If I've done my job well my readers learn and also have fun and which is the way the best teachers work.

You've yourself had the benefit of being taught by novelist Alan Lelchuk at Amherst College.
Lelchuk had accomplished in his life what many in my class hoped to. So obviously we had a lot of respect for him. But he was a very difficult teacher. You could write something which you thought was very very good and he would agree that it was very very good, however... and then point out 10 things that could be really better. I came to understand the importance of editing and throwing out parts that one may love but don't work in the story.

But it was Sidney Sheldon who inspired you to explore thrillers as genre of writing?
You know I went to Phillips Exeter academy and Amherst College where we studied the classics. We did Shakespaeare, the Brontes and Faulkner and Steinbach and I hadn't read much of adult fiction. I was in Tahiti on vacation in 1993 and I found this paperback someone had left behind. It was a Sidney Sheldon's novel - The Doomsday Conspiracy. I didn't know who Sheldon was but just out of curiosity I read the first page and then I read the next one and and the next one and I just read it in one afternoon. That was fun. It was a very different kind of reading experience than I'm used to and I was hooked. I felt may be I should write something like that.

Do you know Danielle Brown?
Never heard of her (Waves his hand, laughs).

She's written a rather terrific book called 187 Men to Avoid: A Survival Guide for the Romantically Frustrated Woman...
You know I almost never talk about that. I wrote it over a weekend. It was just a silly idea that got published. And that's how I got a literary agent. You know I was living in Hollywood, California surrounded by some rather strange people and felt like writing this one weekend. My girlfriend at the time (and now my wife) who worked at the National Academy of Sound Records read it and said, “That's pretty funny.” So I sent a letter to some agents wondering if they're interested in publishing it. One of them got back saying yes. He saw my other writing that was more serious and said, “You should like totally write a novel.” You know at that time I was still a musician. Who would've known I'd become a novelist?

While it emerged only last year that NSA was indulging in widespread unwarranted wire tapping since January 2007 you wrote of this scenario in Digital Fortress (DF) two decades ago?
(Guffaws) Its a little strange that DF is Edward Snowden's story 20 years earlier. I think it was pretty clear to me that all was not right with the National Security Agency as civilian privacy goes. As far as I'm concerned, I don't have any secrets so I'd much rather be safe and willing to sacrifice a little of my own civilian privacy for that. At the same time each one of us needs to decide where that line is. I totally understand the concern that people have given the power NSA has, especially when its emerged that its spying on other countries and stuff like that.

But you know I've spoken to people at the NSA and they say we don't care about secret emails or your secret recipe for banana bread that you're sending to your Aunt Mabel or what neighbour's sleeping with who. They say they're just looking for terrorists. They are not interested in our lives but just after the bad guys. But we need to trust that's true.

And is there much scope for such trust?
(Shrugs his shoulders) You know there was a small election for a state representative or something. One of the contestants was adamantly opposed to the NSA. Devout Christian, family-values and all...that sort of person. One day he found information on which movies he rented at home on his TV had been leaked. And they weren't all 'nice' movies. It just ruined his career and life. So who had the information? How did it get out? So one does worry. The NSA maybe after the bad guys but they've access to all the information and what's to stop anyone from using it. I was shocked during my research to find how much the US government tracks and knows about the average citizen's private life

Looks like DF has a lot going for it to make a good movie.
Well, now that you say it, let me tell you that DF is going to be a TV series likeThe Good Wife or 24. In fact the people who made 24 are making this one too.

You often juxtapose, mix and in some instances even set science and religion, fact and fiction against each other. Is this, in a way, running with the hares and hunting with the foxes?
You know its not something I do intentionally to create controversy. What I do with these books is argue both sides of an equation So in DF I've characters who say civilian privacy is important and the NSA is dangerous. Now the reader reads that and says, "Absolutely! He's right." And in the next chapter you have the NSA saying it stopped three terror attacks on US soil because it can read people's email and the reader again goes, "This is right!" So the reader gets caught in this grey world which is an exciting space to be because you have to make up your own mind and decide.

Do you personally see science and religion as antipodal to each other?
I truly believe that the further you go in the science the more religious science gets. You look at the Higg's Boson, questions about life after death and so on. Science in a way has sort of hit a wall and is having to deal with metaphysicial and existential questions, which is religion. On the other hand religion is using Carbon14 to figure out the document about Jesus' family and Mary Magdalene. So there is an interplay and I truly hope they find the middle ground and realise that they're two different languages telling the same story and can somehow fuse. I think its very important for humankind to realise that all of religion is a myth, a metaphor saying the same thing.
The problem is we read them as fact and we say my parents, my priest told me its a fact and if you think differently or don't believe that then I hate you. Its insane how this makes for the perfect recipe for disaster

Many feel religion only breeds suspicion, hate and bigotry and should be abolished totally. Would you agree?
No I don't agree. There is a definite place for religion but I'd much rather use the word spirituality because religion implies a rigid structure, a dogma, strict dos and don'ts and a certain intolerance of other ideologies. You know religion does enormous good in the world just like it does enormous evil. Its like people, you know. Religion is created by people and they are flawed and so is religion. But that doesn't mean we should get rid of it.

The Da Vinci Code saw members of the Catholic community in Mumbai too protest. Were you shocked at the sheer magnitude and intensity of the outrage against this book and the movie based on it?
(Laughs) I was definitely surprised because I grew up in a household where it was okay to ask difficult questions like what if Jesus Christ was just a prophet and not the Son of God. That was the question I asked in The Da Vinci Code. I knew was treading on sacred ground a little bit but the outrage (Shakes his head), especially here was completely over the top, I thought. Its important to remember that when people boycotted the film or the book, it wasn't oftentimes about The Da Vinci Code. It was about a few Christian priests who wanted attention. Since they saw how many people were talking about it, they wanted to cash in on that by saying, "This is an outrage!" and get people fired up.

But you had priests come up to thank you too?
For about six months or so as Churches held discussion on The Da Vinci Code, attendance went up as people wondered how a council could decide Christ's divinity and the priests had to deal with it. They were forced to revisit history in search of answers to some of the tough questions. So many of them thanked me saying it made them understand their religion better.

Your writing has often been attacked for poor grammar and style.
With my writing I do something very specific and very intentional. Some people love and some hate it. But that's just the nature of creative arts. I disagree with these so-called critics. I'm not trying to show off my language. I'm just telling a story. At the end of the day you want the story to leap off the page and come to you, not send you scurrying to look up a word. The good thing about books is there are many many kinds of writers, and if these critics want someone who uses very floral language and long winding sentences they can read somebody else.

You've said that you resort to inversion therapy to help you out of the writer's block...
(Laughs) I started because my eyes'd be very tired. I read that if you oxygenate your optic nerve by hanging upside down it'd help my eyesight. That's how I started doing it. Later I saw it not only oxygenated my eyes and brain but reversed my joints as gravity was reversed. All the compression on my spine vanished as it pulled it apart. It not only gives you nice sensation if you hang upside down for 2-3 minutes but you also think differently. I often use it decide how to handle something. Maybe it just gives you another perspective

Have you read any Indian writers? What do you think of them?
I don't read any fiction so I have not got around to reading them yet. But I read a lot of non-fiction and my readings have often included writings about the Upanishads and the Vedas.