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

-Arundhati Roy

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Perhaps It's True That

Arundhati Roy

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

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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.

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.

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

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.

To Call Someone 'anti-american', Indeed, To Be Anti-american, Is Not Just Racist, It's A Failure Of The Imagination.

Old. A Viable Die-able Age.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

Humans Are Animals Of Habit.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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

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

Use Your Art To Fight.

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.

His Gratitude Widened His Smile And Bent His Back.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The 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.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

The Writer Is The Midwife Of Understanding.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I'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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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!

India Lives In Several Centuries At The Same Time.

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

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

Things Can Change In A Day.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Wars Are Never Fought For Altruistic Reasons.

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.

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

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.

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

The 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.

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.

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

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

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

I 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.

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

Digital Revolution

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Going To Oxford Didn't Necessarily Make A Person 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The 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.

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

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

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

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

Terrorism Is The Symptom, Not The Disease.

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.

The Only Thing Worth Globalizing Is Dissent.

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.

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'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.

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

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.

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.

Some Things Come With Their Own Punishments.

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

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

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

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.

Poverty Is A Crime And The Poor Are Terrorists

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

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.

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.

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

It's 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Human Rights Takes History Out Of Justice.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excitement Always Leads To Tears.

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

People Always Loved Best What They Identified Most With.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

India And Pakistan

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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