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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.

-Arundhati Roy

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In Iraq, Until Before

Arundhati Roy

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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.

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Violating Human Rights Is Integral To The Project Of Neoliberalism And Global Hegemony.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Stable Markets, Unstable World. Efficiency. Everybody Hears About It. It's Enough To Make You Want To Be Pro-inefficiency And Pro-corruption.

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.

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.

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

Humans Are Animals Of Habit.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I Am Completely A Loner. In My Head I Want To Feel I Can Be Anywhere. There Is A Sort Of Recklessness That Being A Loner Allows Me.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

I Hope That That The People In The Occupy Movement Are Politically Aware Enough To Know That Their Being Excluded From The Obscene Amassing Of Wealth Of Us Corporations Is Part Of The Same System Of The Exclusion And War That Is Being Waged By These Corporations In Places Like India, Africa And The Middle East.

Being With Him Made Her Feel As Though Her Soul Had Escaped From The Narrow Confines Of Her Island Country Into The Vast, Extravagant Spaces Of His. He Made Her Feel As Though The World Belonged To Them- As Though It Lay Before Them Like An Opened Frog On A Dissecting Table, Begging To Be Examined.

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

...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.

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

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.

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.

Heaven Opened And The Water Hammered Down, Reviving The Reluctant Old Well, Greenmossing The Pigless Pigsty, Carpet Bombing Still, Tea-colored Puddles The Way Memory Bombs Still, Tea-colored Minds.

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!

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.

Acceptance Spells Death To A Writer.

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.

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

Colorful Demonstrations And Weekend Marches Are Vital But Alone Are Not Powerful Enough To Stop Wars. Wars Will Be Stopped Only When Soldiers Refuse To Fight, When Workers Refuse To Load Weapons Onto Ships And Aircraft, When People Boycott The Economic Outposts Of Empire That Are Strung Across The Globe.

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

If You Are Happy In A Dream, Ammu, Does That Count? Estha Asked. "does What Count?" "the Happiness Does It Count?". She Knew Exactly What He Meant, Her Son With His Spoiled Puff. Because The Truth Is, That Only What Counts, Counts....."if You Eat Fish In A Dream, Does It Count?" Does It Mean You've Eaten Fish?

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.

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.

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.

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

Some Things Come With Their Own Punishments.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And The Air Was Full Of Thoughts And Things To Say. But At Times Like These, Only The Small Things Are Ever Said. Big Things Lurk Unsaid Inside.

Times Like These

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

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.

It Was A Grand Old House, The Ayemenem House, But Aloof-looking. As Though It Had Little To Do With The People Who Lived In It. Like An Old Man With Rheumy Eyes Watching Children Play, Seeing Only Transience In Their Shrill Elation And Their Whole-hearted Commitment To Life.

They Looked At Each Other. They Weren't Thinking Anymore. The Time For That Had Come And Gone. Smashed Smiles Lay Ahead Of Them. But That Would Be Later. Lay Ter.

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.

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

Old. A Viable Die-able Age.

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

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

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

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.

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?

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?

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.

Poverty Is A Crime And The Poor Are Terrorists

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 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 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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

People Rarely Win Wars, Governments Rarely Lose Them. People Get Killed. Governments Moult And Regroup, Hydra-headed. They Use Flags First To Shrink-wrap People's Minds And Smother Thought, And Then As Ceremonial Shrouds To Bury Their Willing Dead.

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.

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.

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

India Lives In Several Centuries At The Same Time.

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

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.

So Here We Have It. The Equivocating Distinction Between Civilisation And Savagery, Between The "massacre Of Innocent People" Or, If You Like, "a Clash Of Civilisations" And "collateral Damage". The Sophistry And Fastidious Algebra Of Infinite Justice.

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

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.

Biology Designed The Dance. Terror Timed It. Dictated The Rhythm With Which Their Bodies Answered Each Other. As Though They Already Knew That For Each Tremor Of Pleasure They Would Pay With An Equal Measure Of Pain. As Though They Knew That How Far They Went Would Be Measured Against How Far They Would Be Taken.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

We're Told, Often Enough, That As A Species We Are Poised On The Edge Of The Abyss. It's Possible That Our Puffed-up, Prideful Intelligence Has Outstripped Our Instinct For Survival And The Road Back To Safety Has Already Been Washed Away. In Which Case There's Nothing Much To Be Done. If There Is Something To Be Done, Then One Thing Is For Sure: Those Who Created The Problem Will Not Be The Ones Who Come Up With A Solution.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

India Has Millions Of Internally Displaced People. And Now, They Are Putting Their Bodies On The Line And Fighting Back. They Are Being Killed And Imprisoned In Their Thousands. Theirs Is A Battle Of The Imagination, A Battle For The Redefinition Of The Meaning Of Civilisation, Of The Meaning Of Happiness, Of The Meaning Of Fulfilment.

Mao Said He Was Prepared To Have Millions Of Chinese People Perish In A Nuclear War As Long As China Survived... I'm Beginning To Find It More And More Sick That Only Humans Make It Into Our Calculations... Annihilate Life On Earth, But Save The Nation... What's The Subject Heading? Stupidity Or Insanity?

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.

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.

The World Trade Organization, The World Bank, The International Monetary Fund And Other Financial Institutions Virtually Write Economic Policy And Parliamentary Legislation. With A Deadly Combination Of Arrogance And Ruthlessness, They Take Their Sledgehammers To Fragile, Interdependent, Historically Complex Societies And Devastate Them, All Under The Fluttering Banner Of 'reform'.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

He Folded His Fear Into A Perfect Rose. He Held It Out In The Palm Of His Hand. She Took It From Him And Put It In Her Hair.

Her Grief Grieved Her. His Devastated Her.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?"

Sometimes I Think The World Is Divided Into Those Who Have A Comfortable Relationship With Power And Those Who Have A Naturally Adversarial Relationship With Power.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The Only Thing Worth Globalizing Is Dissent.

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.

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.

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

If You're Happy In A Dream, Does That Count?

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.

I Am Very Conscious That, From The Time Of The God Of Small Things Was Published 10 Years Ago, We Are In A Different World ... Which Needs To Be Written About Differently, And I Really Very Much Want To Do That.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Money Need Not Be Our Only Reward.

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 Firstly Don't Think Of Myself As An Activist, I Never Have. I Always Say That, I Think This Word "activist" Is Relatively Recent One. I Don't Remember When People Started Being Called That Or What It Means. It Reduces Both Writers And Activists, It Makes It Seem As Though A Writer's Job Is To Just Keep People Entertained With Best-selling Books And The Activist's Job To Keep On Repeating The Same Thing Without A Great Deal Of Subtlety And Intelligence. I Don't Think Either Is The Case.

I Am A Maoist Sympathiser. I'm Not A Maoist Ideologue, Because The Communist Movements In History Have Been Just As Destructive As Capitalism.

To Call Someone Anti-american, Indeed, To Be Anti-american, (or For That Matter Anti-indian, Or Anti-timbuktuan) Is Not Just Racist, It's A Failure Of The Imagination. An Inability To See The World In Terms Other Than Those That The Establishment Has Set Out For You: If You're Not A Bushie, You're A Taliban. If You Don't Love Us, You Hate Us. If You're Not Good, You're Evil. If You're Not With Us, You're With The Terrorists.

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

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

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.

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?

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

People Say To Me, Oh, It's So Wonderful That You're Writing About Real Things, And That It's A Political Thing To Do, And I Say, Look-to Be In My Position And Not Say Anything Is A Hell Of A Political Thing. You Need To Think Politically, Otherwise You'll Be One Of These People Who Says, Oh, This Person's Saying This And That Person's Saying That, And I'm Confused. And I Say, Yeah, Because You Want To Be Confused.

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).

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 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.

Wars Are Never Fought For Altruistic Reasons.

In A Country Like India, The British Were Only Able To Rule The Country Because It Had Completely Co-opted The Elite Of The Country, Who Did Their Work For Them.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It Is True That Success Is The Most Boring Thing, It Is Tinny And Brittle, Failure Runs Deeper. Success Is Dangerous. I Have A Very Complicated Relationship With That Word.

Complicated Relationship

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.

With The Certitude Of A True Believer, Vellya Paapen Had Assured The Twins That There Was No Such Thing In The World As A Black Cat. He Said That There Were Only Black Cat Chaped Holes In The Universe.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

It Is Curious How Sometimes The Memory Of Death Lives On For So Much Longer Than The Memory Of The Life That Is Purloined.

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.

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.

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.

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

But What Was There To Say? Only That There Were Tears. Only That Quietness And Emptiness Fitted Together Like Stacked Spoons. Only That There Was A Snuffling In The Hollows At The Base Of A Lovely Throat. Only That A Hard Honey-colored Shoulder Had A Semicircle Of Teethmarks On It. Only That They Held Each Other Close, Long After It Was Over. Only That What They Shared That Night Was Not Happiness, But Hideous Grief. Only That Once Again They Broke The Love Laws. That Lay Down Who Should Be Loved. And How. And How Much.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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