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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.

-Arundhati Roy

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The Secret Of The

Arundhati Roy

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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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The Only Thing Worth Globalizing Is Dissent.

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

The 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Literature Is The Opposite Of A Nuclear Bomb.

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.

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.

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.

Excitement Always Leads To Tears.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Old. A Viable Die-able Age.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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.

Your Short-term Gains Are The Rest Of The World's Long-term Disasters - For Everybody, Including Yourselves. And, I'm Sorry, I've Been Saying You And The United States Or America, When I Actually Mean The Us Government. There's A Difference. Big One.

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.

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

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

The [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.

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

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.

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, 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Things Can Change In A Day.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

And 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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Human Rights Takes History Out Of Justice.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Change Is One Thing. Acceptance Is Another.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Her Grief Grieved Her. His Devastated Her.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Poverty Is A Crime And The Poor Are Terrorists

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I'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.

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.

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.

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.

Money Need Not Be Our Only Reward.

The Writer Is The Midwife Of Understanding.

Wars Are Never Fought For Altruistic Reasons.

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.

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.

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

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.

Use Your Art To Fight.

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.

Some Things Come With Their Own Punishments.

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

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

The 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'.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Capitalist Economy

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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?

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.

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