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Now We're In A Situation Where Democracy Has Been Taken Into The Workshop And Fixed, Remodeled To Be Market-friendly. So Now The United States Is Fighting Wars To Instal Democracies. First It Was Topple Them, Now It's Instal Them, Right? And This Whole Rise Of Corporate-funded Ngos In The Modern World, This Notion Of Csr, Corporate Social Responsibility - It's All Part Of A New Managed Democracy. In That Sense, It's All Part Of The Same Machine.

-Arundhati Roy

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Now We're In A

Arundhati Roy

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Now We're In A Situation Where Democracy Has Been Taken Into The Workshop And Fixed, Remodeled To Be Market-friendly. So Now The United States Is Fighting Wars To Instal Democracies. First It Was Topple Them, Now It's Instal Them, Right? And This Whole Rise Of Corporate-funded Ngos In The Modern World, This Notion Of Csr, Corporate Social Responsibility - It's All Part Of A New Managed Democracy. In That Sense, It's All Part Of The Same Machine.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 Writer Is The Midwife Of Understanding.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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.

His Gratitude Widened His Smile And Bent His Back.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Some Writers Like To Boil Down Headlines Of Liberal Newspapers Into Fiction, So They Say There Shouldn't Be Communal Riots, Everybody Should Love Each Other, There Shouldn't Be Boundaries Or Fundamentalism. But I Think Literature Is More Than That; These Are Political Views Which Most Of Us Hold Anyway.

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?"

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.

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.

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

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'.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

In A Way, Writing Is An Incredible Act Of Individualism, Producing Your Language, And Yet To Use It From The Heart Of A Crowd As Opposed To As An Individual Performance Is A Conflicting Thing. I Do Stand Alone, And Yet It's Not About Being An Individual Or Being Ambitious.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Things Can Change In A Day.

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.

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.

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.

Money Need Not Be Our Only Reward.

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.

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

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

After Iraq, There's Been Libya, There's Syria, And The Rhetoric Of, You Know, Democracy Versus Radical Islam. When You Look At The Countries That Were Attacked, None Of Them Were Wahhabi Islamic Fundamentalist Countries. Those Ones Are Supported, Financed By The U.s., So There Is A Real Collusion Between Radical Islam And Capitalism. What Is Going On Is Really A Different Kind Of Battle.

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.

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.

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

Capitalism’s Real “grave-diggers” May End Up Being Its Own Delusional Cardinals, Who Have Turned Ideology Into Faith. Despite Their Strategic Brilliance, They Seem To Have Trouble Grasping A Simple Fact: Capitalism Is Destroying The Planet. The Two Old Tricks That Dug It Out Of Past Crises-war And Shopping-simply Will Not Work.

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.

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).

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

Her Grief Grieved Her. His Devastated Her.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

India Lives In Several Centuries At The Same Time.

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

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

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.

Excitement Always Leads To Tears.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

You Begin To Realize That Hypocrisy Is Not A Terrible Thing When You See What Overt Fascism Is Compared To Sort Of Covert, You Know, Communal Politics Which The Congress Has Never Been Shy Of Indulging In.

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.

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?

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.

Let's Leave One Alive So That It Can Be Lonely.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Change Is One Thing. Acceptance Is Another.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Nothing Mattered Much. Nothing Much Mattered. And The Less It Mattered The Less It Mattered. It Was Never Important Enough. Because Worse Things Had Happened. In The Country That She Came From Poised Forever Between The Terror Of War And The Horror Of Peace Worse Things Kept Happening

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

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.

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.

...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.

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

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.

I Think My Eyes Were Knocked Open And They Don't Close. I Sometimes Wish I Could Close Them And Look Away.

I Think The Occupy Movement Will, Or At Least Should, Become A Protean Movement Of Ideas, As Well As Action, Where The Element Of Surprise Remains With The Protesters. We Need To Preserve The Element Of An Intellectual Ambush And A Physical Manifestation That Takes The Government And The Police By Surprise. It Has To Keep Re-imagining Itself, Because Holding Territory May Not Be Something The Movement Will Be Allowed To Do In A State As Powerful And Violent As The United States.

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.

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.

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.

An Old-growth Forest, A Mountain Range Or A River Valley Is More Important And Certainly More Loveable Than Any Country Will Ever Be.

Mountain Ranges

It Is Such A Supreme Folly To Believe That Nuclear Weapons Are Deadly Only If They're Used.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Terrorism Is The Symptom, Not The Disease.

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

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.

Now We're In A Situation Where Democracy Has Been Taken Into The Workshop And Fixed, Remodeled To Be Market-friendly. So Now The United States Is Fighting Wars To Instal Democracies. First It Was Topple Them, Now It's Instal Them, Right? And This Whole Rise Of Corporate-funded Ngos In The Modern World, This Notion Of Csr, Corporate Social Responsibility - It's All Part Of A New Managed Democracy. In That Sense, It's All Part Of The Same Machine.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Humans Are Animals Of Habit.

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

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.

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

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

People Always Loved Best What They Identified Most With.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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Helen Hunt Jackson

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