Certainly I have more in common with Bernie Sanders than differences. I think if you had to look for differences, you would find them in foreign policy, where my campaign is perhaps more critical - I would say definitely more critical - of funding for regimes like that of the Netanyahu government, which are clearly war criminals.

I don't have a vested interest in a particular political career or a particular political office. My job is to do everything that I can to create an America and a world that we can live in and that we can survive in.

To provide a welcoming path to citizenship for immigrants and to restore our civil liberties, our foreign policy platform is very important.

We create refugees, and then our Democratic Party, together with the Republicans, who are also a party to this, are criminalizing them and sending them back, inhumanely.

We have legislated to protect the public from tax rises and guarantee incomes for pensioners, so enshrining in law more protections for consumers, commuters and investors is possible. Enshrining these rights into law would mean that any future government which wanted to reverse this would have to go through the primary legislative process.

Most of the energy in North America is just consuming - Wal-Mart, shopping centres, government offices - or personal consumption: houses, cars, flying to Hawaii, gambling in Las Vegas. We could live affluent lifestyles with half as much energy.

To be an Indian writer is to write, necessarily and inevitably, about politics, so it was a given that the story of the Ghoshes, the family at the centre of 'The Lives of Others,' should have a political soul.

I think good governance and good politics can go together.