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I Actually Did A Quick Survey Of How Caste Plays Out In Contemporary India. The Idea That Democracy And Development Have In Some Ways Eroded Caste Turned Out Not To Be The Case, That It Has In Fact Been Entrenched And Modernised.

-Arundhati Roy

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I Actually Did A

Arundhati Roy

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I Actually Did A Quick Survey Of How Caste Plays Out In Contemporary India. The Idea That Democracy And Development Have In Some Ways Eroded Caste Turned Out Not To Be The Case, That It Has In Fact Been Entrenched And Modernised.

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The Fact Is That America's Weapons Systems Have Made It Impossible For Anybody To Confront It Militarily. So, All You Have Is Your Wits And Your Cunning, And Your Ability To Fight In The Way The Iraqis Are Fighting.

Election Campaigns Seem To Siphon Away Political Anger And Even Basic Political Intelligence Into This Great Vaudeville, After Which We All End Up In Exactly The Same Place.

Her Grief Grieved Her. His Devastated Her.

In India The New Government - The Members Of The Radical Hindu Right Who Want India To Be A 'hindu Nation' - They're Bigots. Butchers. Massacres Are Their Unofficial Election Campaigns - Orchestrated To Polarise Communities And Bring In The Vote.

Anyway, What Is A Country? When People Say, "tell Me About India," I Say, "which India?.... The Land Of Poetry And Mad Rebellion? The One That Produces Haunting Music And Exquisite Textiles? The One That Invented The Caste System And Celebrates The Genocide Of Muslims And Sikhs And The Lynching Of Dalits? The Country Of Dollar Billionaires? Or The One In Which 800 Million Live On Less Than Half-a-dollar A Day? Which India?"

If You Look At Indian Society, It's A Society Made Up Of Minorities. There's Nobody Who's Not A Minority, Whether It's Ethnicity, Caste Or Religion. But The Whole Effort Now Is To Confect A Political Constituency - An Ethnic Or A Religious Constituency That Can Coalesce Into A Political Majority In Order To Deal With This Model Of Representative Democracy. That Process Has Been A Hundred Years In The Making In This Part Of The World.

The Way Her Body Existed Only Where He Touched Her. The Rest Of Her Was Smoke.

India's A Very Interesting Place... There's No Formal Opposition, But There's Genuine On-the-ground Opposition.

The Trouble Is That Once America Goes Off To War, It Can't Very Well Return Without Having Fought One. If It Doesn't Find Its Enemy, For The Sake Of The Enraged Folks Back Home, It Will Have To Manufacture One. Once War Begins, It Will Develop A Momentum, A Logic And A Justification Of Its Own, And We'll Lose Sight Of Why It's Being Fought In The First Place.

Look At The Israel-palestine Conflict, For Example. If You Look At A Map From 1947 To Now, You'll See That Israel Has Gobbled Up Almost All Of Palestinian Land With Its Illegal Settlements. To Talk About Justice In That Battle, You Have To Talk About Those Settlements. But, If You Just Talk About Human Rights, Then You Can Say, "oh, Hamas Violates Human Rights," "israel Violates Human Rights." Ergo, Both Are Bad.

The Occupy Movement Found Places Where People Who Were Feeling That Anger Could Come And Share It - And That Is, As We All Know, Extremely Important In Any Political Movement. The Occupy Sites Became A Way You Could Gauge The Levels Of Anger And Discontent.

I Do What I Do, And Write What I Write, Without Calculating What Is Worth What And So On. Fortunately, I Am Not A Banker Or An Accountant. I Feel That There Is A Time When A Political Statement Needs To Be Made And I Make It.

The Genocide Will Not Necessarily Take The Form Of War, Or Death Camps. Most Likely It Will Take The Form Of Ecocide, In Which Landscapes Are Devastated And The Populations That Live There Slowly Starve Or Turn Upon Each Other Savagely Because There Isn't Enough Food Or Water To Go Around.

Literature Is The Opposite Of A Nuclear Bomb.

He Could Do Only One Thing At A Time. If He Held Her, He Couldn't Kiss Her. If He Kissed Her, He Couldn't See Her. If He Saw Her, He Couldn't Feel Her.

I Actually Did A Quick Survey Of How Caste Plays Out In Contemporary India. The Idea That Democracy And Development Have In Some Ways Eroded Caste Turned Out Not To Be The Case, That It Has In Fact Been Entrenched And Modernised.

Little Events, Ordinary Things, Smashed And Reconstituted. Suddenly, They Become The Bleached Bones Of A Story.

In Delhi The Cars Are Getting Bigger And Sleeker, The Hotels Are Getting Posher, The Gates Are Getting Higher, And The Guards Are No Longer The Old Chowkidars, The Watchmen, But They Are Fellows With Guns. And Yet The Poor Are Packed Into Every Crevice Like Lice In The City. People Don't See That Anymore. It's As If You Shine A Light Very Brightly In One Place, The Darkness Deepens Around.

Of Course, There's An Alternative To Terrorism: It's Called Justice.

States Have Invested Themselves With The Right To Legitimise Violence - So Who Gets Criminalised And Delegitimised? Only - Or Well That's Excessive - Usually, The Resistance.

Non-violence Should Be A Tactic - Not An Ideology Preached From The Sidelines To Victims Of Massive Violence.

His Gratitude Widened His Smile And Bent His Back.

Power Is Fortified Not Just By What It Destroys, But Also By What It Creates. Not Just By What It Takes, But Also By What It Gives. And Powerlessness Reaffirmed Not Just By The Helplessness Of Those Who Have Lost, But Also By The Gratitude Of Those Who Have (or Think They Have) Gained.

I Know That A World In Which Countries Are Stockpiling Nuclear Weapons And Using Them In The Ways That India And Pakistan And America Do To Oppress Others And To Deceive Their Own People Is A Dangerous World.

India And Pakistan

Impelled By Feelings That Were Primal Yet Paradoxically Wholly Impersonal. Feelings Of Contempt Born Of Inchoate, Unacknowledged Fear--civilization's Fear Of Nature, Men's Fear Of Women, Power's Fear Of Powerlessness. Man's Subliminal Urge To Destroy What He Could Neither Subdue Nor Deify.

Imagine What Would Happen If The Government Were To Take The Wealth Of 200,000 Of India's Richest People And Redistribute It Amongst 2 Million Of India's Poorest? We Would Hear A Lot About Socialist Appropriation And The Death Of Democracy. Why Should Taking From The Rich Be Called Appropriation And Taking From The Poor Be Called Development?

What Came For Them? Not Death. Just The End Of Living.

They All Broke The Rules. They All Crossed Into Forbidden Territory. They All Tampered With The Laws That Lay Down Who Should Be Loved And How. And How Much. The Laws That Make Grandmothers Grandmothers, Uncles Uncles, Mothers Mothers, Cousins Cousins, Jam Jam, And Jelly Jelly. It Was A Time When Uncles Became Fathers, Mothers Lovers, And Cousins Died And Had Funerals. It Was A Time When The Unthinkable Became Thinkable And The Impossible Really Happened.

I Think Many People Were Surprised By The Victory Of The Congress, Because It Was Really Hard To See Beyond The Sort Of Haze Of Hatred That The Hindu Nationalists Had Been Spreading.

Nationalism Of One Kind Or Another Was The Cause Of Most Of The Genocide Of The Twentieth Century. Flags Are Bits Of Colored Cloth That Governments Use First To Shrink-wrap People's Minds And Then As Ceremonial Shrouds To Bury The Dead.

Non-violence Is A Piece Of Theatre. You Need An Audience. What Can You Do When You Have No Audience?

They Were Not Friends, Comdrade Pillai And Inspector Thomas Matthew, And They Didn't Trust Each Other. But They Understood Each Other Perfectly. They Were Both Men Whom Childhood Had Abandoned Without A Trace. Men Without Curiosity. Without Doubt. Both In Their Own Way Truly, Terrifyingly, Adult. They Looked Out Into The World And Never Wondered How It Worked, Because They Knew. They Worked It. They Were Mechanics Who Serviced Different Parts Of The Same Machine.

See, Ma'am, Frankly Speaking This Problem Can't Be Solved By Us Police Or Military. The Problem With These Tribals Is They Don't Understand Greed. Unless They Become Greedy There's No Hope For Us. I Have Told My Boss, Remove The Force And Instead Put A Tv In Every Home. Everything Will Be Automatically Sorted Out.

The Revolution Cannot Be Funded. It's Not The Imagination Of Trusts And Foundations That's Going To Bring Real Change.

Novels Are Such Mysterious And Amorphous And Tender Things. And Here We Are With Our Crash Helmets On, With Concertina Wire All Around Us.

It Was A Time When The Unthinkable Became The Thinkable And The Impossible Really Happened

It's Odd How Those Who Dismiss The Peace Movement As Utopian, Don't Hesitate To Proffer The Most Absurdly Dreamy Reasons For Going To War: To Stamp Out Terrorism, Install Democracy, Eliminate Fascism, And Most Entertainingly, To "rid The World Of Evil-doers.

Insanity Hovered Close At Hand, Like An Eager Waiter At An Expensive Restaurant.

Either Way, Change Will Come. It Could Be Bloody, Or It Could Be Beautiful. It Depends On Us.

The Imf And The World Bank, The Most Opaque And Secretive Entities, Put Millions Into Ngos Who Fight Against "corruption" And For "transparency." They Want The Rule Of Law - As Long As They Make The Laws. They Want Transparency In Order To Standardise A Situation, So That Global Capital Can Flow Without Any Impediment.

Flat Muscled And Honey Coloured. Sea Secrets In His Eyes. A Silver Raindrop In His Ear.

The Indian Government Has Managed To Turn The Concept Of Nonviolence On Its Head. Nonviolent Resistance And Nonviolent Governance. Unlike, Say, China Or Turkey Or Indonesia, India Doesn't Mow Down Its People. It Doesn't Kill People Who Are Refusing To Move. It Just Waits It Out. It Continues To Do What It Has To Do And Ignores The Consequences.

Things Can Change In A Day.

They Would Grow Up Grappling With Ways Of Living With What Happened. They Would Try To Tell Themselves That In Terms Of Geological Time It Was An Insignificant Event. Just A Blink Of The Earth Woman's Eye. That Worse Things Had Happened. That Worse Things Kept Happening. But They Would Find No Comfort In The Thought.

There's No Division On My Bookshelf Between Fiction And Nonfiction. As Far As I'm Concerned, Fiction Is About The Truth.

Change Is One Thing. Acceptance Is Another.

Smells, Like Music, Hold Memories. She Breathed Deep, And Bottled It Up For Posterity.

Ammu Said That Human Beings Were Creatures Of Habit, And It Was Amazing The Kind Of Things One Could Get Used To.

Fiction Is The Most Joyous, Beautiful, Sophisticated, Wonderful Thing In The World.

The Writer Is The Midwife Of Understanding.

As Indian Citizens, We Subsist On A Regular Diet Of Caste Massacres And Nuclear Tests, Mosque Breakings And Fashion Shows, Church Burnings And Expanding Cell Phone Networks, Bonded Labor And The Digital Revolution, Female Infanticide And The Nasdaq Crash, Husbands Who Continue To Burn Their Wives For Dowry And Our Delectable Stockpile Of Miss Worlds. What's Hard To Reconcile Oneself To, Both Personally And Politically, Is The Schizophrenic Nature Of It.

In Iraq, Until Before The War, The Women Were Scientists, Museum Directors, Doctors. I'm Not Valourising Saddam Hussein Or The Soviet Occupation Of Afghanistan, Which Was Brutal And Killed Hundreds Of Thousands Of People - It Was The Soviet Union's Vietnam. I'm Just Saying That Now, In These New Wars, Whole Countries Have Slipped Into Mayhem - The Women Have Just Been Pushed Back Into Their Burqas - And Not By Choice.

If You Look At The History Of The Ford Foundation And Rockefeller, In Latin America, In Indonesia, Where Almost A Million People, Mainly Communists, Were Killed By General Suharto, Who Was Backed By The Cia, In South Africa, In The Us Civil Rights Movement - Or Even Now, It's Very Disturbing. They Have Always Worked Closely With The Us State Department.

The Invasion Of Iraq Will Surely Go Down In History As One Of The Most Cowardly Wars Ever Fought. It Was A War In Which A Band Of Rich Nations, Armed With Enough Nuclear Weapons To Destroy The World Several Times Over, Rounded On A Poor Nation, Falsely Accused It Of Having Nuclear Weapons, Used The United Nations To Force It To Disarm, Then Invaded It, Occupied It, And Are Now In The Process Of Selling It.

When I'm Outside The Cities I Do Feel Optimistic. There Is Such Grandeur In India And So Much Beauty.

Every Strategy For Real Social Change - Land Reform, Education, Public Health, The Equitable Distribution Of Natural Resources ... - Has Been Cleverly, Cunningly, And Consistently Scuttled And Rendered Ineffectual By Those Castes And That Class Of People Which Has A Stranglehold On The Political Process.

He Walked On Water. Perhaps. But Could He Have *swum* On Land? In Matching Knickers And Dark Glasses? With His Fountain In A Love-in-tokyo? In Pointy Shoes And A Puff? Would He Have Had The Imagination?

Pointed In The Wrong Direction, Trapped Outside Their Own History And Unable To Retrace Their Steps Because Their Footprints Had Been Swept Away.

Perhaps It's True That Things Can Change In A Day. That A Few Dozen Hours Can Affect The Outcome Of Whole Lifetimes. And That When They Do, Those Few Dozen Hours, Like The Salvaged Remains Of A Burned House---the Charred Clock, The Singed Photograph, The Scorched Furniture---must Be Resurrected From The Ruins And Examined. Preserved. Accounted For. Little Events, Ordinary Things, Smashed And Reconstitutred. Imbued With New Meaning. Suddenly They Become The Bleached Bones Of A Story.

Human Beings Seem Unable To Live Without War, But They Are Also Unable To Live Without Love.

Privatisation Is Presented As Being The Only Alternative To An Inefficient, Corrupt State. In Fact, It Is Not A Choice At All... It Is A Mutually Profitable Business Contract Between The Private Company (preferably Foreign) And The Ruling Elite Of The Third World

Excitement Always Leads To Tears.

I Could Weep For A River-valley, And I Have. But For A Country? Oh Man, I Don't Know.

Writers Imagine That They Cull Stories From The World. I'm Beginning To Believe That Vanity Makes Them Think So. That It's Actually The Other Way Around. Stories Cull Writers From The World. Stories Reveal Themselves To Us. The Public Narrative, The Private Narrative - They Colonize Us. They Commission Us. They Insist On Being Told. Fiction And Nonfiction Are Only Different Techniques Of Story Telling. For Reasons That I Don't Fully Understand, Fiction Dances Out Of Me, And Nonfiction Is Wrenched Out By The Aching, Broken World I Wake Up To Every Morning.

It's Being Made Out That The Whole Point Of The War Was To Topple The Taliban Regime And Liberate Afghan Women From Their Burqas, We Are Being Asked To Believe That The U.s. Marines Are Actually On A Feminist Mission.

I'm An Activist; I Have To Be Angry All The Time. That's What We Do!

Because Of Who I Am And What Place I Have Now In India, I'm Petitioned All The Time To Get Involved. It's Exhausting And Very Difficult To Have To Say, 'look, I'm Only One Person. I Can't Do Everything.' I Know That I Don't Want To Be Worn To The Bone Where I Lose My Sense Of Humor.

India Lives In Several Centuries At The Same Time. Every Night Outside My House I Pass A Road Gang Of Emaciated Laborers Digging A Trench To Lay Fiber Optic Cables To Speed Up Digital Revolution. They Work By The Light Of A Few Candles.

Digital Revolution

I'm Not Ambitious. I Don't Want To Get Anywhere, I Don't Want Anything More. I Sometimes Think That For Me That Is The Real Freedom, That I Don't Want Anything. I Don't Want Money Or Prizes. I Want People To Know That A War Is Going To Be Fought.

Once You've Seen Certain Things, You Can't Un-see Them, And Seeing Nothing Is As Political An Act As Seeing Something.

I Really Worry About These Political People That Have No Personal Life. If There's Nothing That's Lovely, And If There's Nothing That's Just Ephemeral, That You Can Just Lie On The Floor And Bust A Gut Laughing At, Then What's The Point?

The Only Thing Worth Globalizing Is Dissent.

People Can Be Extraordinarily Resilient And Show Extraordinary Grace And Humour Even In Moments Of Tribulation. I've Always Found That It's Much Easier For People Who Are Not Terribly, Badly Off To Lose Hope And To Be Pessimistic. I Suppose That When You Are In A Really Serious Situation, You Have To Be Present, You Have To Think About It, There's Not Much Scope For Self-pity.

By Then Esthappen And Rahel Had Learned That The World Had Other Ways Of Breaking Men. They Were Already Familiar With The Smell. Sicksweet. Like Old Roses On A Breeze.

Snowden Is The Thoughtful, Courageous Saint Of Liberal Reform. And Julian Assange Is A Sort Of Radical, Feral Prophet Who Has Been Prowling This Wilderness Since He Was 16 Years Old.

At Some Stage, As The Water Tables Are Dropping And The Minerals That Remain In The Mountains Are Being Taken Out, We Are Going To Confront A Crisis From Which We Cannot Return. The People Who Created The Crisis In The First Place Will Not Be The Ones That Come Up With A Solution.

The Congress Has Historically Played Covert Communal Politics In Order To Create What In India We Call Vote Banks Where You Pit One Community Against Another And So On In Order To Secure Votes.

From Being A Dream, Dams Have Become A Very Cynical Corrupt Enterprise; A Way Of Letting Governments Lay Their Hands On Huge Sums Of Money; A Way Of Centralizing Resources; A Way Of Snatching Rivers Away From The Poor And Giving Them To The Rich. And So In A Sense They've Become Monuments To Corruption.

In India, The Poverty Is So Vast That The State Cannot Control It. It Can Beat People, But It Can't Prevent The Poor From Flooding The Roads, The Cities, The Parks And Railway Station Platforms.

We Ought To Say, "occupy Wall Street, Not Iraq," "occupy Wall Street, Not Afghanistan," "occupy Wall Street, Not Palestine." The Two Need To Be Put Together. Otherwise People Might Not Read The Signs.

When She Looked At Herself In Her Wedding Photographs, Ammu Felt The Woman That Looked Back At Her Was Someone Else. A Foolish Jewelled Bride. Her Silk Sunset-coloured Sari Shot With Gold. Rings On Every Finger. White Dots Of Sandalwood Paste Over Her Arched Eye-brows. Looking At Herself Like This, Ammu's Soft Mouth Would Twist Into A Small, Bitter Smile At The Memory - Not Of The Wedding Itself So Much As The Fact That She Had Permitted Herself To Be So Painstakingly Decorated Before Being Led To The Gallows. It Seemed So Absurd. So Futile. Like Polishing Firewood.

At A Time When Opportunism Is Everything, When Hope Seems Lost, When Everything Boils Down To A Cynical Business Deal, We Must Find The Courage To Dream. To Reclaim Romance. The Romance Of Believing In Justice, In Freedom, And In Dignity. For Everybody.

Humbling Was A Nice Word, Rahel Thought. Humbling Along Without A Care In The World

She Wore Flowers In Her Hair And Carried Magic Secrets In Her Eyes. She Spoke To No One. She Spent Hours On The Riverbank. She Smoked Cigarettes And Had Midnight Swims.

It Is After All So Easy To Shatter A Story. To Break A Chain Of Thought. To Ruin A Fragment Of A Dream Being Carried Around Carefully Like A Piece Of Porcelain. To Let It Be, To Travel With It, As Velutha Did, Is Much The Harder Thing To Do.

My Writing Is Translated Into Every Indian Language, It's Distributed In Pamphlets, In Little Private Video Things, It's Everywhere. So It's A Lovely Pastime For The Middle Class To Think Of Itself As The Whole Nation.

I Stand By What I Write And Follow Through On What I Write.

The Only Dream Worth Having, I Told Her, Is To Dream That You Will Live While You're Alive And Die Only When You're Dead.

There Are Things That You Can't Do - Like Writing Letters To A Part Of Yourself. To Your Feet Or Hair. Or Heart.

To Stay Quiet Is As Political An Act As Speaking Out.

Is Globalization About 'the Eradication Of World Poverty,' Or Is It A Mutant Variety Of Colonialism, Remote Controlled And Digitally Operated?

Our Strategy Should Be Not Only To Confront Empire, But To Lay Siege To It. To Deprive It Of Oxygen. To Shame It. To Mock It. With Our Art, Our Music, Our Literature, Our Stubbornness, Our Joy, Our Brilliance, Our Sheer Relentlessness — And Our Ability To Tell Our Own Stories. Stories That Are Different From The Ones We’re Being Brainwashed To Believe. The Corporate Revolution Will Collapse If We Refuse To Buy What They Are Selling — Their Ideas, Their Version Of History, Their Wars, Their Weapons, Their Notion Of Inevitability.

A Sparrow Lay Dead On The Backseat. She Had Found Her Way Through A Hole In The Windscreen, Tempted By Some Seat-sponge For Her Nest. She Never Found Her Way Out. No One Noticed Her Panicked Car-window Appeals. She Died On The Backseat, With Her Legs In The Air. Like A Joke.

I Sometimes Think I Was Perhaps The Only Girl In India Whose Mother Said, "whatever You Do, Don't Get Married". For Me, When I See A Bride, It Gives Me A Rash. I Find Them Ghoulish, Almost.

The People Who Created The Crisis In The First Place Will Not Be The Ones That Come Up With A Solution.

With One Hand, You're Selling The Country Out To Western Multinationals. And With The Other, You Want To Defend Your Borders With Nuclear Bombs. It's Such An Irony! You're Saying That The World Is A Global Village, But Then You Want To Spend Crores Of Rupees On Building Nuclear Weapons.

As I Keep Saying, Fiction Is Truth. I Think Fiction Is The Truest Thing There Ever Was.

People Who Promote The Free Market And Growth Are Far More Romantic, And Far More Ideologically Driven And Blinded By Their Vision Than Somebody Who Goes In And Comments About The Beauty Of A Forest Or The Stars In The Sky.

The People Who Are Getting Rich Can't Imagine That The World Is Not A Better Place.

Ngos Are Dangerous. They Do What The Missionaries Used To Do In Colonial Times. They Are Trojan Horses. The Worse The Situation, The More The Ngos.

Dams Are The Temples Of Secular India And Almost Worshipped. They Are Huge, Wet Cement Flags That Wave In Our Minds. They're The Symbol Of Nationalism To Many.

Cage The People, Free The Money. The Only Thing That Is Allowed To Move Freely - Unimpeded - Around The World Today Is Money... Capital.

The Crisis Of Modern Democracy Is A Profound One. Free Elections, A Free Press And An Independent Judiciary Mean Little When The Free Market Has Reduced Them To Commodities Available On Sale To The Highest Bidder.

Poverty Is A Crime And The Poor Are Terrorists

The Mullahs Of The Islamic World And The Mullahs Of The Hindu World And The Mullahs Of The Christian World Are All On The Same Side. And We Are Against Them All.

Madness Slunk In Through A Chink In History. It Only Took A Moment.

Empathy May Be The Single Most Important Quality That Must Be Nurtured To Give Peace A Fighting Chance.

It's Very Easy For Me To Begin To Believe The Publicity About Myself, Whether For Or Against. It Can Give You An Absurd Idea Of Yourself. I Know That There's A Fine Balance Between Accepting Your Own Power With Grace And Misusing It. And I Don't Ever Want To Portray Myself As A Representative Of The Voiceless. I'm Scared Of That.

As A Writer, I've Often Said That, Among The Other Things That We Need To Reclaim, Other Than The Obscene Wealth Of Billionaires, Is Language. Language Has Been Deployed To Mean The Exact Opposite Of What It Really Means When They Talk About Democracy Or Freedom.

Soviet-style Communism Failed, Not Because It Was Intrinsically Evil, But Because It Was Flawed. It Allowed Too Few People To Usurp Too Much Power. Twenty-first Century Market Capitalism, American-style, Will Fail For The Same Reasons. Both Are Edifices Constructed By Human Intelligence, Undone By Human Nature.

This Was The Trouble With Families. Like Invidious Doctors, They Knew Just Where It Hurt.

It's All A Play. Hiroshima And Nagasaki Happen, There Are Hundreds Of Thousands Of Dead, And The Curtain Comes Down, And That's The End Of That. Then Korea Happens. Vietnam Happens, All That Happened In Latin America Happens. And Every Now And Then, This Curtain Comes Down And History Begins Anew. New Moralities And New Indignations Are Manufactured...in A Disappeared History.

Hiroshima And Nagasaki

The World's 'freeest' Country Has The Highest Number In Prison.

What Sort Of Love Is This Love That We Have For Countries? What Sort Of Country Is It That Will Ever Live Up To Our Dreams? What Sort Of Dreams Were These That Have Been Broken? Isn't The Greatness Of Great Nations Directly Proportionate To Their Ability To Be Ruthless, Genocidal? Doesn't The Height Of A Country's 'success' Usually Also Mark The Depths Of Its Moral Failure?

There Was A Time When The Women Of Afghanistan - At Least In Kabul - Were Out There. They Were Allowed To Study, They Were Doctors And Surgeons, Walking Free, Wearing What They Wanted. That Was When It Was Under Soviet Occupation. Then The United States Starts Funding The Mujahideen. Reagan Called Them Afghanistan's "founding Fathers." It Reincarnates The Idea Of "jehad," Virtually Creates The Taliban.

Railing Against The Past Will Not Heal Us. History Has Happened. It's Over And Done With. All We Can Do Is To Change Its Course By Encouraging What We Love Instead Of Destroying What We Don't.

I Am A Woman Who Is A Granddaughter Of A Lady Who Used To Be Beaten On The Head By Her Husband, Of A Mother Who Went Through Hell Because She Was Divorced And Had To Bring Up These Kids. And I Can Take 10 Men Out To Lunch And Pay The Bill, And Nobody Even Thinks Twice About It. So Don’t Mess With Me.

Iraq Was Only The Latest In A Succession Of Countries. Earlier, There Was Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya, Granada, Panama. But This Time It Wasn't Just Your Ordinary Brand Of Friendly Neighborhood Frenzy. It Was Frenzy With A Purpose. It Ushered In An Old Doctrine In A New Bottle: The Doctrine Of Preemptive Strike, Also Known As The United States Can Do Whatever The Hell It Wants, And That's Official. The War Against Iraq Has Been Fought And Won, And No Weapons Of Mass Destruction Have Been Found, Not Even A Little One.

India Is Still Flinching From A Cultural Insult, Still Looking For Its Identity.

Your Enemies Are Always Manufactured To Suit Your Purpose, Right? How Can You Have A Good Enemy? You Have To Have An Utterly Evil Enemy - And Then The Evilness Has To Progress.

I Never Do Anything Because I'm A Celebrity, As A Rule. I Do What I Do As A Citizen.

When You Think Of How Much Violence, How Much Blood... How Much Has Been Destroyed To Create The Great Nations, America, Australia, Britain, Germany, France, Belgium - Even India, Pakistan. Having Destroyed So Much To Make Them, We Must Have Nuclear Weapons To Protect Them - And Climate Change To Hold Up Their Way Of Life... A Two-pronged Annihilation Project.

Corporate Globalization Is Being Relentlessly And Arbitrarily Imposed On An Essentially Feudal Society, Tearing Through Its Complex, Tiered Social Fabric, Ripping It Apart Culturally And Economically.

Ngos Have A Complicated Space In Neoliberal Politics. They Are Supposed To Mop Up The Anger. Even When They Are Doing Good Work, They Are Supposed To Maintain The Status Quo. They Are The Missionaries Of The Corporate World.

Indian Intellectuals Today Feel Radical When They Condemn Fundamentalism, But Not Many People Are Talking About The Links Between Privatization, Globalization, And Fundamentalism.

Nationalism Of One Kind Or Another Was The Cause Of Most Of The Genocide Of The Twentieth Century.

Delhi Is A Very Maligned City, And Deservedly So. Yet There's Something About It. It's A Secret City, It Doesn't Hang Out Its Wares. It's Like A Very Deep River. Floating Right Up On Top Are The Institutions Of Contemporary Power: Government, Politics, Media, And Then There's The Bureaucracy, The Diplomatic Missions. But It's Also The City Of Intellectual Debate, Of Protest, It's The City Where People From All Over The Country Converge To Express Their Anger. And Then, Underneath All That, There's This Crumbling, Ancient City, A Confluence Of So Much History.

Rahel’s Toy Wristwatch Had The Time Painted On It. Ten To Two. One Of Her Ambitions Was To Own A Watch On Which She Could Change The Time Whenever She Wanted To (which According To Her Was What Time Was Meant For In The First Place).

The Time Has Come For Everybody -capitalists, Communists, Socialists- To Ask Themselves What 'civilization' Really Means. If Not, Whether A Country Calls Itself Capitalist Or Communists, In The Pursuit Of 'progress' , It Will Visit Genocide Either On Its Own People Or On Another People Whose Country Must Be Plundered For Resources To Feed The Progress Industry.

All My Books Are Accidental Books - They Come From Reacting To Things And Thinking About Things And Engaging In A Real Way. They Are Not About, 'oh, Did It Get A Good Review In The Guardian?' I Don't Care.

When People Stop Some Film From Being Shot Or Burn A Book, It's Not Just That They Are Saying, This Is Against Indian Culture. They Are Also Saying, You Westernized, Elite, English-speaking People Are Having Too Much Of A Good Time. It's A Very Interesting Phenomenon.

Every Time I Say The Word Capitalism, Everyone Just Assumes I Have Plenty Of Marxism In Me, I Do. But Russia And China Had Their Bloody Revolutions And Even While They Were Communist, They Had The Same Idea About Generating Wealth - Tear It Out Of The Bowels Of The Earth. And Now They Have Come Out With The Same Idea In The End... You Know, Capitalism. But Capitalism Will Fail, Too.

I Feel Ashamed That The New, Nuclear, Neo-liberal India Thinks Of Itself As A 'natural Ally' Of Israel. Ever Since India Began To Call Itself An Emerging Superpower, It Has Become A Slavish, Groveling Satellite State Of The Us.

To Annihilate Indigenous Populations Eventually Paves The Way To Our Own Annihilation. They Are The Only People Who Practice Sustainable Living. We Think They Are Relics Of The Past, But They May Be The Gatekeepers To Our Future.

Ever Since The Great Depression, We Know That One Of The Key Ways In Which The Us Economy Has Stimulated Growth Is By Manufacturing Weapons And Exporting War To Other Countries.

Anything's Possible In Human Nature," Chacko Said In His Reading Aloud Voice. Talking To The Darkness Now, Suddenly Insensitive To His Little Fountain-haired Niece. "love. Madness. Hope. Infinite Joy." Of The Four Things That Were Possible In Human Nature, Rahel Thought That Infinnate Joy Sounded The Saddest. Perhaps Because Of The Way Chacko Said It. Infinnate Joy. With A Church Sound To It. Like A Sad Fish With Fins All Over.

The Idea Of "human Rights," For Example - Sometimes It Bothers Me. Not In Itself, But Because The Concept Of Human Rights Has Replaced The Much Grander Idea Of Justice.

When People Say "the People" Or "the Public" As Though It's The Final Repository Of All Morality, I Sometimes Flinch.

Pity The Nation That Has To Silence Its Writers For Speaking Their Minds. Pity The Nation That Needs To Jail Those Who Ask For Justice, While Communal Killers, Mass Murderers, Corporate Scamsters, Looters, Rapists, And Those Who Prey On The Poorest Of The Poor, Roam Free.

There Is A War That Makes Us Adore Our Conquerors And Despise Ourselves.

Even Capitalists Must Surely Admit, That Intellectually At Least, Socialism Is A Worthy Opponent. It Imparts Intelligence Even To Its Adversaries.

I Need Fiction Like You Need To Eat Or Exercise.

… He Remained Restrained And Strangely Composed. It Was A Composure Born Of Extreme Provocation. It Stemmed From A Lucidity That Lies Beyond Rage.

I Can't Be A Part Of The Large Convoy Because It's Not A Choice That You Can Make. The Fact That I'm An Educated Person Means That I Can't Be On That Convoy. I Don't Want To Be On It. I Don't Want To Be A Victim. I Don't Want To Disappear Into The Darkness.

The Trouble Is That Once You See It, You Can't Unsee It. And Once You've Seen It, Keeping Quiet, Saying Nothing, Becomes As Political An Act As Speaking Out. There's No Innocence. Either Way, You're Accountable.

Going To Oxford Didn't Necessarily Make A Person Clever.

Because Of The Caste System, Because Of The Fact That There Is No Social Link Between Those Who Make The Decisions And Those Who Suffer The Decisions, The Indian Government Just Goes Ahead And Does What It Wants. The People Also Assume That This Is Their Lot, Their Karma, What Was Written. It's Quite An Efficient Way Of Doing Things. Therefore, India Has A Very Good Reputation In The World As A Democracy, As A Government That Cares, That Has Just Got Too Much On Its Hands, Whereas, In Fact, It's Actually Creating The Problems.

The American People Ought To Know That It Is Not Them, But Their Government's Policies, That Are So Hated.

We Often Confuse Or Loosely Use The Ideas Of Crony Capitalism Or Neoliberalism To Actually Avoid Using The Word "capitalism", But Once You've Actually Seen, Let's Say, What's Happening In India And The United States - That This Model Of Us Economics Packaged In A Carton That Says "democracy" Is Being Forced On Countries All Over The World, Militarily If Necessary, Has In The United States Itself Resulted In 400 Of The Richest People Owning Wealth Equivalent [to That] Of Half Of The Population.

So Far As We Are Concerned, There Is Not One Word In The Statements That I Have Made In This Council Which Can Be Interpreted To Mean That We Will Not Honour International Obligations. I Want To Say For The Purpose Of The Record That There Is Nothing That Has Been Said On Behalf Of The Government Of India Which In The Slightest Degree Indicates That The Government Of India Or The Union Of India Will Dishonour Any International Obligations It Has Undertaken.

If You're Not Religious, Then Look At It This Way. This World Of Ours Is Four Thousand, Six Hundred Million Years Old. It Could End In An Afternoon.

It Is Such A Supreme Folly To Believe That Nuclear Weapons Are Deadly Only If They're Used. The Fact That They Exist At All, Their Presence In Our Lives, Will Wreak More Havoc Than We Can Begin To Fathom. Nuclear Weapons Pervade Our Thinking. Control Our Behavior. Administer Our Societies. Inform Our Dreams. They Bury Themselves Like Meat Hooks Deep In The Base Of Our Brains. They Are Purveyors Of Madness. They Are The Ultimate Colonizer. Whiter Than Any White Man That Ever Lived. The Very Heart Of Whiteness.

I Grew Up In A Little Village In Kerala. It Was A Nightmare For Me. All I Wanted To Do Was To Escape, To Get Out, To Never Have To Marry Somebody There. Of Course, They Were Not Dying To Marry Me. I Was The Worst Thing A Girl Could Be: Thin, Black, And Clever.

Terrorism Is The Symptom, Not The Disease.

When She Listened To Songs That She Loved On The Radio, Something Stirred Inside Her. A Liquid Ache Spread Under Her Skin, And She Walked Out Of The World Like A Witch.

To Love. To Be Loved. To Never Forget Your Own Insignificance. To Never Get Used To The Unspeakable Violence And The Vulgar Disparity Of Life Around You. To Seek Joy In The Saddest Places. To Pursue Beauty To Its Lair. To Never Simplify What Is Complicated Or Complicate What Is Simple. To Respect Strength, Never Power. Above All, To Watch. To Try And Understand. To Never Look Away. And Never, Never To Forget.

When Was The Last Time The United States Won A War? You Know, It Lost In Vietnam. It's Lost In Afghanistan. It's Lost In Iraq. And It Will Not Be Able To Contain The Situation. It Is Hemorrhaging. It Is Now - You Know, Of Course You Can Continue With Drone Attacks, And You Can Continue These Targeted Killings, But On The Ground, A Situation Is Being Created Which No Army - Not America, Not Anybody - Can Control. And It's Just, You Know, A Combination Of Such Foolishness, Such A Lack Of Understanding Of Culture In The World.

To Understand History,' Chacko Said, 'we Have To Go Inside And Listen To What They're Saying. And Look At The Books And The Pictures On The Wall. And Smell The Smells.

Anything's Possible In Human Nature ...love. Madness. Hope. Infinite Joy.

It's So Frightening, The Nationalism In The Air.

The Corporate Revolution Will Collapse If We Refuse To Buy What They Are Selling - Their Ideas, Their Version Of History, Their Wars, Their Weapons, Their Notion Of Inevitability. Remember This: We Be Many And They Be Few. They Need Us More Than We Need Them.

History Is Really A Study Of The Future, Not The Past.

We Must Pay Close Attention To Those With Another Imagination: An Imagination Outside Of Capitalism, As Well As Communism. We Will Soon Have To Admit That Those People, Like The Millions Of Indigenous People Fighting To Prevent The Takeover Of Their Lands And The Destruction Of Their Environment - The People Who Still Know The Secrets Of Sustainable Living - Are Not Relics Of The Past, But The Guides To Our Future.

Whatever Else Their Faults May Be, They Were Not Radical Islamist States - Iraq Was Not, Syria Is Not, Libya Was Not. The Most Radical Fundamentalist Islamist State Is, Of Course, Your America's Saudi Arabia.

I'm Not Somebody Who Plans My Life. In Fact, I Don't Know What's Going To Happen Here In India, It's Such A Strange Climate Here At The Moment. So Very Worrying.

I Don't Think The State Will Allow People To Occupy A Particular Space Unless It Feels That Allowing That Will End Up In A Kind Of Complacency, And The Effectiveness And Urgency Of The Protest Will Be Lost.

People Always Loved Best What They Identified Most With.

Use Your Art To Fight.

This Is A Diseased Century. We Diagnosed The Disease And Its Causes With Microscopic Exactness, But Whenever We Applied The Healing Knife A New Sore Appeared. Our Will Was Hard And Pure, We Should Have Been Loved By The People, But They Hate Us. Why Are We So Odious And Detested? We Brought You Truth And In Our Mouth It Sounded Like A Lie. We Brought You Freedom, And It Looks In Our Hands Like A Whip. We Brought You The Living Life, And Where Our Voice Is Heard The Trees Wither And There Is A Rustling Of Dry Leaves. We Brought You The Promise Of The Future, But Our Tongue Stammered And Barked.

If Protesting Against Having A Nuclear Bomb Implanted In My Brain Is Anti-hindu And Anti-national, Then I Secede. I Hereby Declare Myself An Independent, Mobile Republic. I Am A Citizen Of The Earth. I Own No Territory. I Have No Flag. My Policies Are Simple. I'm Willing To Sign Any Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty Or Nuclear Test Ban Treaty That's Going. Immigrants Are Welcome. You Can Help Me Design Our Flag.

Proliferation Treaty

That It Really Began In The Days When The Love Laws Were Made. The Laws That Lay Down Who Should Be Loved, And How. And How Much.

Many People Have Accused Me Of Having A Romantic View, Whereas I Personally I Feel Sorry For Those Who Have Lost Romance In Their Lives.

But Can We, Should We, Let Apprehensions About The Future Immobilize Us In The Present?

He Held Her As Though She Was A Gift. Given To Him In Love. Something Still And Small. Unbearably Precious.

I Think That I Was Quite A Grown-up Child, And I Have Been A Pretty Childish Adult.

Margaret Kochamma's Tiny, Ordered Life Relinquished Itself To This Truly Baroque Bedlam With The Quiet Gasp Of A Warm Body Entering A Chilly Sea.

We Need A New Kind Of Politics. Not The Politics Of Governance, But The Politics Of Resistance. The Politics Of Opposition. The Politics Of Joining Hands Across The World And Preventing Certain Destruction.

It's Ok Just To Be A Writer, Who Writes About The Society In Which He Lives And The Issues That Most Important. Now How Can That Not Be A Writer, It Always Was. It's Just Recently That Writers Have Been Reduced To These Playthings Of The Market.

When She Looked At Him Now, She Couldn't Help Thinking That The Man He Had Become Bore So Little Resemblance To The Boy He Had Been. His Smile Was The Only Piece Of Baggage He Had Carried With Him From Boyhood Into Manhood.

In America, The Poor Have Been Invisibilised, Because Obviously This Model Of Success That Has Been Held Out To The World Must Not Show The Poor, It Must Not Show The Condition Of Black People. It Can Only The Successful Ones, Basketball Players, Musicians, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell. But I Think The Time Will Come When The Occupy Movement Will Have To Somehow Formulate Something More Than Just Anger.

When The United States Invaded Iraq, A New York Times/cbs News Survey Estimated That 42 Percent Of The American Public Believed That Saddam Hussein Was Directly Responsible For The September 11 Attacks On The World Trade Center And The Pentagon. And An Abc News Poll Said That 55 Percent Of Americans Believed That Saddam Hussein Directly Supported Al-qaeda. None Of This Opinion Is Based On Evidence (because There Isn’t Any).

I Am An Artist And A Writer, And I Do Think That One Always Places Oneself In The Picture To See Where One Fits. I Left Home When I Was Sixteen And Lived In Places Where It Was Very Easy For Me To Have Fallen The Other Way. I Could Have Been On The Large Convoy Because I Was A Woman And I Was Alone. In India, That's Not A Joke. I Could Have Ended Up Very, Very Badly. I'm Lucky That I Didn't.

Have We Raised The Threshold Of Horror So High That Nothing Short Of A Nuclear Strike Qualifies As A 'real' War? Are We To Spend The Rest Of Our Lives In This State Of High Alert With Guns Pointed At Each Other's Heads And Fingers Trembling On The Trigger?

That's What Careless Words Do. They Make People Love You A Little Less.

But Remember That If The Struggle Were To Resort To Violence, It Will Lose Vision, Beauty And Imagination. Most Dangerous Of All, It Will Marginalize And Eventually Victimize Women. And A Political Struggle That Does Not Have Women At The Heart Of It, Above It, Below It, And Within It Is No Struggle At All.

As Estha Stirred The Thick Jam He Thought Two Thoughts And The Two Thoughts He Thought Were These: A) Anything Can Happen To Anyone. And B) It Is Best To Be Prepared.

Sometimes The State And The Constitution Are More Enlightened Than Society.

In India, We Have A Right Wing That Is So Vicious And So Openly Wicked, Which Is The Baratiya Janata Party (bjp), And Then We Have The Congress Party, Which Does Almost Worse Things, But Does It By Night. And People Feel That The Only Choices They Have Are To Vote For This Or For That. And My Point Is That, Whoever You Vote For, It Doesn't Have To Consume All The Oxygen In The Political Debate.

Fiction And Non-fiction Are Only Different Techniques Of Story Telling. For Reasons I Do Not Fully Understand, Fiction Dances Out Of Me. Non-fiction Is Wrenched Out By The Aching, Broken World I Wake Up To Every Morning.

In The Forests Of Central India And In Many, Many Rural Areas, A Huge Battle Is Being Waged. Millions Of People Are Being Driven Off Their Lands By Mining Companies, By Dams, By Infrastructure Companies, And A Huge Battle Is Being Waged. These Are Not People Who Have Been Co-opted Into Consumer Culture, Into The Western Notions Of Civilisation And Progress. They Are Fighting For Their Lands And Their Livelihoods, Refusing To Be Looted So That Someone Somewhere Far Away May "progress" At Their Cost.

Memory Was That Woman On The Train. Insane In The Way She Sifted Through Dark Things In A Closet And Emerged With The Most Unlikely Ones - A Fleeting Look, A Feeling. The Smell Of Smoke. A Windscreen Wiper. A Mother's Marble Eyes. Quite Sane In The Way She Left Huge Tracts Of Darkness Veiled. Unremembered.

It Is Curious How Sometimes The Memory Of Death Lives On For So Much Longer Than The Memory Of The Life That It Purloined. Over The Years, As The Memory Of Sophie Mol ... Slowly Faded, The Loss Of Sophie Mol Grew Robust And Alive. It Was Always There. Like A Fruit In Season. Every Season. As Permanent As A Government Job.

Today, The Indian Government Is Trying To Present Privatization As The Alternative To The State, To Public Enterprise. But Privatization Is Only A Further Evolution Of The Centralized State, Where The State Says That They Have The Right To Give The Entire Power Production In Maharashtra To Enron.

Each Of The Iraqi Children Killed By The United States Was Our Child. Each Of The Prisoners Tortured In Abu Ghraib Was Our Comrade. Each Of Their Screams Was Ours. When They Were Humiliated, We Were Humiliated. The U.s. Soldiers Fighting In Iraq - Mostly Volunteers In A Poverty Draft From Small Towns And Poor Urban Neighborhoods - Are Victims Just As Much As The Iraqis Of The Same Horrendous Process, Which Asks Them To Die For A Victory That Will Never Be Theirs.

In India, 100 Of The Richest People Own Assets Worth 25% Of The Gross Domestic Product. There's Something Terribly Wrong. No Individual And No Corporation Should Be Allowed To Amass That Kind Of Unlimited Wealth, Including Bestselling Writers Like Myself, Who Are Showered With Royalties.

America Is Like Some Crazed, Bewildered, Rich Giant Bumbling Around In A Poor Area With His Pockets Stuffed With Money, And Lots Of Weapons - Just Throwing Stuff Around.

The Only Good Thing About Nuclear War Is That It Is The Single Most Egalitarian Idea That Man Has Ever Had. On The Day Of Reckoning, You Will Not Be Asked To Present Your Credentials. The Devastation Will Be Indiscriminate.

If He Touched Her, He Couldn't Talk To Her, If He Loved Her He Couldn't Leave, If He Spoke He Couldn't Listen, If He Fought He Couldn't Win.

Flags Are Bits Of Colored Cloth Used First To Shrinkwrap People's Brains And Then As Ceremonial Shrouds To Bury The Dead.

I Don't Have The Big Idea. I Don't Have The Arrogance To Even Want To Have The Big Idea. But I Believe The Physics Of Resisting Power Is As Old As The Physics Of Accumulating Power. That's What Keeps The Balance In The Universe... The Refusal To Obey.

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Kenneth H. Cooper

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