Background Image

...

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.

-Arundhati Roy

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

In India, We Have

Arundhati Roy

...

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.

Views: 4

Topic

More From Arundhati Roy

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.

Truly, There's No Alternative To Stupidity. Cretinism Is The Mother Of Fascism. I Have No Defence Against It, Really....

Human Rights Takes History Out Of Justice.

His Gratitude Widened His Smile And Bent His Back.

Another World Is Not Only Possible, She Is On Her Way. On A Quiet Day, I Can Hear Her Breathing.

Our Tragedy Today Is Not Just That Millions Of People Who Called Themselves Communist Or Socialist Were Physically Liquidated In Vietnam, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Not Just That China And Russia, After All That Revolution, Have Become Capitalist Economies, Not Just That The Working Class Has Been Ruined In The United States And Its Unions Dismantled, Not Just That Greece Has Been Brought To Its Knees, Or That Cuba Will Soon Be Assimilated Into The Free Market - It Is Also That The Language Of The Left, The Discourse Of The Left, Has Been Marginalised And Is Sought To Be Eradicated.

Capitalist Economy

The Whole Privatisation Of Health And Education, Of Natural Resources And Essential Infrastructure - All Of This Is So Twisted And So Antithetical To Anything That Would Place The Interests Of Human Beings Or The Environment At The Center Of What Ought To Be A Government Concern - Should Stop. The Amassing Of Unfettered Wealth Of Individuals And Corporations Should Stop. The Inheritance Of Rich People's Wealth By Their Children Should Stop. The Expropriators Should Have Their Wealth Expropriated And Redistributed.

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.

In 2001, We Were Told That The War In Afghanistan Was A Feminist Mission. The Marines Were Liberating Afghan Women From The Taliban. Can You Really Bomb Feminism Into A Country? And Now, After 25 Years Of Brutal War - 10 Years Against The Soviet Occupation, 15 Years Of Us Occupation - The Taliban Is Riding Back To Kabul And Will Soon Be Back To Doing Business With The United States.

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

Sometimes There's Truth In Old Cliches. There Can Be No Real Peace Without Justice. And Without Resistance There Will Be No Justice.

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.

One Beach-colored. One Brown. One Loved. One Loved A Little Less.

Public Support In The U.s. For The War Against Iraq Was Founded On A Multitiered Edifice Of Falsehood And Deceit, Coordinated By The U.s. Government And Faithfully Amplified By The Corporate Media.

Talk Loud Enough About Human Rights And It Gives The Impression Of Democracy At Work, Justice At Work. There Was A Time When The United States Waged War To Topple Democracies, Because Back Then Democracy Was A Threat To The Free Market. Countries Were Nationalising Their Resources, Protecting Their Markets.... So Then, Real Democracies Were Being Toppled. They Were Toppled In Iran, They Were Toppled All Across Latin America, Chile.

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

Democracy No Longer Means What It Was Meant To. It Has Been Taken Back Into The Workshop. Each Of Its Institutions Has Been Hollowed Out, And It Has Been Returned To Us As A Vehicle For The Free Market, Of The Corporations. For The Corporations, By The Corporations. Even If We Do Vote, We Should Just Spend Less Time And Intellectual Energy On Our Choices And Keep Our Eye On The Ball.

As A Woman Who Grew Up In A Village In India, I've Spent My Whole Life Fighting Tradition. There's No Way That I Want To Be A Traditional Indian Housewife.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Human Rights Are Fundamental Rights, They Are The Minimum, The Very Least We Demand. Too Often, They Become The Goal Itself. What Should Be The Minimum Becomes The Maximum - All We Are Supposed To Expect - But Human Rights Aren't Enough. The Goal Is, And Must Always Be, Justice.

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.

...as The Disparity Between The Rich And The Poor Grows, The Fight To Corner Resources Is Intensifying. To Push Through Their "sweetheart Deals," To Corporatize The Crops We Grow, The Water We Drink, The Air We Breathe, And The Dreams We Dream, Corporate Globalization Needs An International Confederation Of Loyal, Corrupt, Authoritarian Governments In Poorer Countries To Push Through Unpopular Reforms And Quell The Mutinies. Corporate Globalization-or Shall We Call It By Its Name?-imperialism-needs A Press That Pretends To Be Free. It Needs Courts That Pretend To Dispense Justice.

The Truth Is That It's Far Easier To Make A Bomb Than To Educate Four Hundred Million People.

There's Really No Such Thing As The 'voiceless'. There Are Only The Deliberately Silenced, Or The Preferably Unheard.

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.

Corporations That Are Turning Over These Huge Profits Can Own Everything: The Media, The Universities, The Mines, The Weapons Industry, Insurance Hospitals, Drug Companies, Non-governmental Organisations. They Can Buy Judges, Journalists, Politicians, Publishing Houses, Television Stations, Bookshops And Even Activists. This Kind Of Monopoly, This Cross-ownership Of Businesses, Has To Stop.

Publishing House

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?"

Here They Learned To Wait. To Watch. To Think Thoughts And Not Voice Them.

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).

Thousands Are Losing Their Jobs And Homes, While Corporations Are Being Bailed Out With Billions Of Dollars.

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

The Secret Of The Great Stories Is That They Have No Secrets. The Great Stories Are The Ones You Have Heard And Want To Hear Again. The Ones You Can Enter Anywhere And Inhabit Comfortably... In The Great Stories You Know Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Finds Love, Who Doesn't. And Yet You Want To Know Again.

There Is Nothing That Pleases Me More Than A Beautiful Sentence ... It Is Something That Satisfies Me.

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.

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.

The [booker] Prize Was Actually Responsible In Many Ways For My Political Activism. I Won This Thing And I Was Suddenly The Darling Of The New Emerging Indian Middle Class – They Needed A Princess. They Had The Wrong Woman. I Had This Light Shining On Me At The Time, And I Knew That I Had The Stage To Say Something About What Was Happening In My Country. What Is Exciting About What I Have Done Since Is That Writing Has Become A Weapon, Some Kind Of Ammunition.

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

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

And When We Look In Through The Windows, All We See Are Shadows. And When We Try And Listen, All We Hear Is A Whispering. And We Cannot Understand The Whispering, Because Our Minds Have Been Invaded By A War. A War That We Have Both Won And Lost. The Very Worst Sort Of War. A War That Captures Dreams And Re-dreams Them. A War That Has Made Us Adore Our Conquerors And Despise Ourselves.

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.

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.

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

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.

When You Say Things Like, 'we Have To Wipe Out The Taliban,' What Does That Mean? The Taliban Is Not A Fixed Number Of People. The Taliban Is An Ideology That Has Sprung Out Of A History That, You Know, America Created Anyway.

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

Making Bombs Will Only Destroy Us. It Doesn't Matter Whether We Use Them Or Not. They Will Destroy Us Either Way.

Peace, Inc. Is Sometimes As Worrying As War, Inc. It's A Way Of Managing Public Anger. We're All Being Managed, And We Don't Even Know It.

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.

In India, Whichever Language You Write In, The Possibility Of People Not Understanding Irony Or Not Understanding [remains There]. This As A Writer Is Most Terrifying!

As She Watched Him She Understood The Quality Of His Beauty. How His Labor Had Shaped Him. How The Wood He Fashioned Had Fashioned Him. Each Plank He Planed, Each Nail He Drove, Each Thing He Made Molded Him. Had Left Its Stamp On Him. Had Given Him His Strength, His Supple Grace.

Three-quarters Of India Lives On The Edge Of The Market Economy. You Can't Tell Them That Only Those Who Can Afford Water Can Have It.

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

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.

I've Never Been That Person Who Thought That Because I've Written One Novel, I Should Write Another And Another. It's Only When There Was Another Novel To Write That I Was Going To Write Another.

May In Ayemenem Is A Hot, Brooding Month. The Days Are Long And Humid. The River Shrinks And Black Crows Gorge On Bright Mangoes In Still, Dustgreen Trees. Red Bananas Ripen. Jackfruits Burst. Dissolute Bluebottles Hum Vacuously In The Fruity Air. Then They Stun Themselves Against Clear Windowpanes And Die, Fatly Baffled In The Sun.

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

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.

Wars Are Never Fought For Altruistic Reasons. They're Usually Fought For Hegemony, For Business. And Then Of Course There's The Business Of War.

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.

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

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

Fascism Itself Can Only Be Turned Away If All Those Who Are Outraged By It Show A Commitment To Social Justice That Equals The Intensity Of Their Indignation.

Ammu Loved Her Children (of Course), But Their Wide-eyed Vulnerability And Their Willingness To Love People Who Didn't Really Love Them Exasperated Her And Sometimes Made Her Want To Hurt Them-- Just As An Education, A Precaution.

Change Is One Thing. Acceptance Is Another.

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.

Just A Few Years Ago India, Pakistan And Bangladesh Were One Country. Actually, We Were Many Countries If You Count The Princely States.... Then The British Drew A Line, And Now We're Three Countries, Two Of Them Pointing Nukes At Each Other - The Radical Hindu Bomb And The Radical Muslim Bomb.

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.

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

Torture Has Been Privatized Now, So You Have Obviously The Whole Scandal In America About The Abuse Of Prisoners And The Fact That, Army People Might Be Made To Pay A Price, But Who Are The Privatized Torturers Accountable Too?

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

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.

Humans Are Animals Of Habit.

And There It Was Again. Another Religion Turned Against Itself. Another Edifice Constructed By The Human Mind, Decimated By Human Nature.

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.

It Is Only Now, These Years Later, That Rahel With Adult Hindsight Recognized The Sweetness Of That Gesture. A Grown Man Entertaining Three Raccoons, Treating Them Like Real Ladies. Instinctively Colluding In The Conspiracy Of Their Fiction, Taking Care Not To Decimate It With Adult Carelessness. Or Affection. 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.

Nilekani's Technocratic Obsession With Gathering Data Is Consistent With That Of Bill Gates, As Though Lack Of Information Is What Is Causing World Hunger.

I Think It Was 50 Million People Across The World Who Marched Against The War In Iraq. It Was Perhaps The Biggest Display Of Public Morality In The World - You Know, I Mean, Before The War Happened. Before The War Happened, Everybody Knew That They Were Being Fed Lies.

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.

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.

The Ngo-ization Of Politics Threatens To Turn Resistance Into A Well-mannered, Reasonable, Salaried, 9-to-5 Job. With A Few Perks Thrown In. Real Resistance Has Real Consequences. And No Salary.

How Carelessly Imperial Power Vivisected Ancient Civilizations. Palestine And Kashmir Are Imperial Britain's Festering, Blood-drenched Gifts To The Modem World. Both Are Fault Lines In The Raging International Con�icts Of Today.

Ancient Civilizations

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

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.

What Is Happening To Our World Is Almost Too Colossal For Human Comprehension To Contain...to Contemplate Its Girth And Its Circumference, To Attempt To Define It, To Try And Fight It All At Once, Is Impossible. The Only Way To Combat It Is By Fighting Specific Wars In Specific Ways.

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.

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.

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

What's A Country? It's Just An Administrative Unit, A Glorified Municipality. Why Do We Imbue It With Esoteric Meaning And Protect It With Nuclear Bombs? I Can't Bow Down To A Municipality... It's Just Not Intelligent. The Bastards Will Do What They Have To Do, And We'll Do What We Have To Do. Even If They Annihilate Us, We'll Go Down On The Other Side.

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.

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

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.

If We Were To Lose The Ability To Be Emotional, If We Were To Lose The Ability To Be Angry, To Be Outraged, We Would Be Robots. And I Refuse That.

The Writer Is The Midwife Of Understanding.

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.

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.

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?

We're Supposed To Forget Whatever Happened In The Past Because 9/11 Is Where History Begins. Okay, Since 2001, How Many Wars Have Been Started, How Many Countries Have Been Destroyed? So Now Isis Is The New Evil - But How Did That Evil Begin? Is It More Evil To Do What Isis Is Doing, Which Is To Go Around Massacring People - Mainly, But Not Only, Shi'a - Slitting Throats? By The Way, The Us-backed Militias Are Doing Similar Things, Except They Don't Show Beheadings Of White Folks On Tv.

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.

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

If You Are Religious, Then Remember That This Bomb Is Man's Challenge To God. It's Worded Quite Simply: We Have The Power To Destroy Everything That You Have Created. If You're Not Religious, Then Look At It This Way. This World Of Ours Is 460,000,000 Years Old. It Could End In An Afternoon.

Fiction Is Truth. I Think Fiction Is The Truest Thing There Ever Was. My Whole Effort Is To Remove That Distinction. The Writer Is The Midwife Of Understanding. It's Very Important For Me To Tell Politics Like A Story, To Make It Real.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Acceptance Spells Death To A Writer.

Literature Is The Opposite Of A Nuclear Bomb.

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.

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.

You Have Come To A Stage Where You Almost Have To Work On Yourself. You Know, On Finding Some Tranquility With Which To Respond To These Things, Because I Realize That The Biggest Risk That Many Of Us Run Is Beginning To Get Inured To The Horrors.

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

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.

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.

The U.s. Corporate Media, Otherwise Known As The "free Press," Is That Hollow Pillar On Which Contemporary American Democracy Rests.

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.

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.

Every People, Every Society, Needs A Culture Of Resistance, A Culture Of Being Difficult And Disobedient, That Is The Only Way They Will Ever Be Able To Stand Up To The Inevitable Abuse Of Power By Whoever Runs The State Apparatus, The Capitalists, The Communists, The Socialists, The Gandhians, Whoever.

The American Way Of Life Is Not Sustainable. It Doesn’t Acknowledge That There Is A World Beyond America.

Old. A Viable Die-able Age.

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

Terrorism Is The Symptom, Not The Disease.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I Don't Want To Be A Victim. I Don't Want To Disappear Into The Darkness.

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.

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.

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.

I Do Believe That Fundamental To Any Real Hope Is That We Do Need To Reconstitute What Has Been Generally Handed Out As The Recipe For "happiness" For The Human Race, And What Has Generally Been Decided Counts As "progress." People Arrive At A Different Understanding Of Happiness, However Fragile It Is. They Find It In Unexpected Ways, In The Most Unexpected Of Places.

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.

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.

Use Your Art To Fight.

Democracy No Longer Means What It Was Meant To. It Has Been Taken Back Into The Workshop. Each Of Its Institutions Has Been Hollowed Out, And It Has Been Returned To Us As A Vehicle For The Free Market, Of The Corporations. For The Corporations, By The Corporations.

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

She Viewed Ethnic Cleansing, Famine And Genocide As Direct Threats To Her Furniture.

The Religious Rightwingism Is Directly Linked To Globalization And To Privatization. When India Is Talking About Selling Its Entire Power Sector To Foreign Multinationals, When The Political Climate Gets Too Hot And Uncomfortable, The Government Will Immediately Start Saying, Should We Build A Hindu Temple On The Site Of The Babri Mosque? Everyone Will Go Baying Off In That Direction. It's A Game.

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

After Using The 'good Offices' Of Un Diplomacy (economic Sanctions And Weapons Inspections) To Ensure That Iraq Was Brought To Its Knees, Its People Starved, Half A Million Of Its Children Killed, Its Infrastructure Severely Damaged, After Making Sure That Most Of Its Weapons Have Been Destroyed, In An Act Of Cowardice That Must Surely Be Unrivalled In History, The 'allies' / 'coalition Of The Willing' (better Known As The Coalition Of The Bullied And Bought) - Sent In An Invading Army!

Flags Are Bits Of Colored Cloth That Governments Use First To Shrink-wrap People’s Brains And Then As Ceremonial Shrouds To Bury The Dead. When Independent-thinking People (and Here I Do Not Include The Corporate Media) Begin To Rally Under Flags, When Writers, Painters, Musicians, Film Makers Suspend Their Judgment And Blindly Yoke Their Art To The Service Of The “nation,” It’s Time For All Of Us To Sit Up And Worry.

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

If You Want To Control Somebody, Support Them. Or Marry Them.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Some Things Come With Their Own Punishments.

The Minute What You Think Of As Radical Becomes An Institutionalised, Funded Operation, You're In Some Trouble.

The Idea Of Justice - Even Just Dreaming Of Justice - Is Revolutionary. The Language Of Human Rights Tends To Accept A Status Quo That Is Intrinsically Unjust - And Then Tries To Make It More Accountable.

The Uid Is A Corporate Scam Which Funnels Billions Of Dollars Into The It Sector

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

Anyway, Now She Thinks Of Estha And Rahel As Them, Because, Separately, The Two Of Them Are No Longer What They Were Or Ever Thought They Would Be. Ever. Their Lives Have A Size And A Shape Now. Estha Has His And Rahel Hers. Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks And Limits Have Appeared Like A Team Of Trolls On Their Separate Horizons. Short Creatures With Long Shadows, Patrolling The Blurry End. Gentle Half-moons Have Gathered Under Their Eyes And They Are As Old As Ammu Was When She Died.

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

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.

I Am An Artist And A Writer, And I Do Think That One Always Places Oneself In The Picture To See Where One Fits.

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

One Of The Reasons Some People Get So Angry With Me Is Because I Have The Space Now That A Lot Of Others Who Think Like Me Don't.

India Lives In Several Centuries At The Same Time.

Some Things Come With Their Own Punishments. Like Bedrooms With Built-in Cupboards. They Would All Learn More About Punishments Soon. That They Came In Different Sizes. That Some Were So Big They Were Like Cupboards With Built-in Bedrooms. You Could Spend Your Whole Life In Them, Wandering Through Dark Shelving.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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?

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

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.

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.

Thousands Of Years Of Ideological, Philosophical And Practical Decisions Were Made. They Altered The Surface Of The Earth, The Coordinates Of Our Souls. For Every One Of Those Decisions, Maybe There's Another Decision That Could Have Been Made, Should Have Been Made.

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.

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.

The Great Irony Is That People Who Live In Remote Areas, Who Are Illiterate And Don't Own Tvs, Are In Some Ways More Free Because They Are Beyond The Reach Of Indoctrination By The Modern Mass Media.

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.

The Strange Thing About Roman Soldiers In The Comics Was The Amount Of Trouble They Took Over Their Armor And Their Helmets, And Then, After All That, They Left Their Legs Bare. It Didn't Make Any Sense At All. Weatherwise Or Otherwise.

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.

The War In Afghanistan Was Fought For Feminist Reasons, And The Marines Were Really On This Feminist Mission. But Today, All The Women In All These Countries Have Been Driven Back Into Medieval Situations. Women Who Were Liberated, Women Who Were Doctors And Lawyers And Poets And Writers And - You Know, Pushed Back Into This Shia Set Against Sunnis. The U.s. Is Supporting Al-qaeda Militias All Over This Region And Pretending That It's Fighting Islam. So We Are In A Situation That Is Psychopathic.

Poverty Is A Crime And The Poor Are Terrorists

Trending Author

James F. Cooper

Patricia Briggs

Denise Richards

Category