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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.

-Arundhati Roy

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The War In Afghanistan

Arundhati Roy

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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.

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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

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

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.

Whatever Else Their Faults May Be, They Were Not Radical Islamist States - Iraq Was Not, Syria Is Not, Libya Was Not. The Most Radical Fundamentalist Islamist State Is, Of Course, Your America's Saudi Arabia.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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

Literature Is The Opposite Of A Nuclear Bomb.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Old. A Viable Die-able Age.

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.

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.

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

Wars Are Never Fought For Altruistic Reasons.

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.

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.

From Being A Dream, Dams Have Become A Very Cynical Corrupt Enterprise; A Way Of Letting Governments Lay Their Hands On Huge Sums Of Money; A Way Of Centralizing Resources; A Way Of Snatching Rivers Away From The Poor And Giving Them To The Rich. And So In A Sense They've Become Monuments To Corruption.

I'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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

But Remember That If The Struggle Were To Resort To Violence, It Will Lose Vision, Beauty And Imagination. Most Dangerous Of All, It Will Marginalize And Eventually Victimize Women. And A Political Struggle That Does Not Have Women At The Heart Of It, Above It, Below It, And Within It Is No Struggle At All.

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

Iraq Was Only The Latest In A Succession Of Countries. Earlier, There Was Cuba, Nicaragua, Libya, Granada, Panama. But This Time It Wasn't Just Your Ordinary Brand Of Friendly Neighborhood Frenzy. It Was Frenzy With A Purpose. It Ushered In An Old Doctrine In A New Bottle: The Doctrine Of Preemptive Strike, Also Known As The United States Can Do Whatever The Hell It Wants, And That's Official. The War Against Iraq Has Been Fought And Won, And No Weapons Of Mass Destruction Have Been Found, Not Even A Little One.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

India Lives In Several Centuries At The Same Time.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

When Was The Last Time The United States Won A War? You Know, It Lost In Vietnam. It's Lost In Afghanistan. It's Lost In Iraq. And It Will Not Be Able To Contain The Situation. It Is Hemorrhaging. It Is Now - You Know, Of Course You Can Continue With Drone Attacks, And You Can Continue These Targeted Killings, But On The Ground, A Situation Is Being Created Which No Army - Not America, Not Anybody - Can Control. And It's Just, You Know, A Combination Of Such Foolishness, Such A Lack Of Understanding Of Culture In The World.

The 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.

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

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

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

People Always Loved Best What They Identified Most With.

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.

Excitement Always Leads To Tears.

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

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.

The Fact Is That America's Weapons Systems Have Made It Impossible For Anybody To Confront It Militarily. So, All You Have Is Your Wits And Your Cunning, And Your Ability To Fight In The Way The Iraqis Are Fighting.

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.

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.

Use Your Art To Fight.

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 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.

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

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.

The Only Good Thing About Nuclear War Is That It Is The Single Most Egalitarian Idea That Man Has Ever Had. On The Day Of Reckoning, You Will Not Be Asked To Present Your Credentials. The Devastation Will Be Indiscriminate.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

In 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Only Thing Worth Globalizing Is Dissent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

All My Books Are Accidental Books - They Come From Reacting To Things And Thinking About Things And Engaging In A Real Way. They Are Not About, 'oh, Did It Get A Good Review In The Guardian?' I Don't Care.

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

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

Human Rights Takes History Out Of Justice.

Her Grief Grieved Her. His Devastated Her.

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 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.

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'.

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.

We Often Confuse Or Loosely Use The Ideas Of Crony Capitalism Or Neoliberalism To Actually Avoid Using The Word "capitalism", But Once You've Actually Seen, Let's Say, What's Happening In India And The United States - That This Model Of Us Economics Packaged In A Carton That Says "democracy" Is Being Forced On Countries All Over The World, Militarily If Necessary, Has In The United States Itself Resulted In 400 Of The Richest People Owning Wealth Equivalent [to That] Of Half Of The Population.

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

Money Need Not Be Our Only Reward.

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

I 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.

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

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.

Acceptance Spells Death To A Writer.

Look At The Israel-palestine Conflict, For Example. If You Look At A Map From 1947 To Now, You'll See That Israel Has Gobbled Up Almost All Of Palestinian Land With Its Illegal Settlements. To Talk About Justice In That Battle, You Have To Talk About Those Settlements. But, If You Just Talk About Human Rights, Then You Can Say, "oh, Hamas Violates Human Rights," "israel Violates Human Rights." Ergo, Both Are Bad.

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.

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

Publishing House

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.

Indian Intellectuals Today Feel Radical When They Condemn Fundamentalism, But Not Many People Are Talking About The Links Between Privatization, Globalization, And Fundamentalism.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Humans Are Animals Of Habit.

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.

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.

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.

To Understand History,' Chacko Said, 'we Have To Go Inside And Listen To What They're Saying. And Look At The Books And The Pictures On The Wall. And Smell The Smells.

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.

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.

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

The Writer Is The Midwife Of Understanding.

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

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.

Nationalism Of One Kind Or Another Was The Cause Of Most Of The Genocide Of The Twentieth Century. Flags Are Bits Of Colored Cloth That Governments Use First To Shrink-wrap People's Minds And Then As Ceremonial Shrouds To Bury The Dead.

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

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

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

The Occupy Movement Found Places Where People Who Were Feeling That Anger Could Come And Share It - And That Is, As We All Know, Extremely Important In Any Political Movement. The Occupy Sites Became A Way You Could Gauge The Levels Of Anger And Discontent.

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 Need Fiction Like You Need To Eat Or Exercise.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Some Things Come With Their Own Punishments.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Writers Imagine That They Cull Stories From The World. I'm Beginning To Believe That Vanity Makes Them Think So. That It's Actually The Other Way Around. Stories Cull Writers From The World. Stories Reveal Themselves To Us. The Public Narrative, The Private Narrative - They Colonize Us. They Commission Us. They Insist On Being Told. Fiction And Nonfiction Are Only Different Techniques Of Story Telling. For Reasons That I Don't Fully Understand, Fiction Dances Out Of Me, And Nonfiction Is Wrenched Out By The Aching, Broken World I Wake Up To Every Morning.

I 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Terrorism Is The Symptom, Not The Disease.

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.

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.

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

Things Can Change In A Day.

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.

Poverty Is A Crime And The Poor Are Terrorists

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.

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

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.

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 Think Many People Were Surprised By The Victory Of The Congress, Because It Was Really Hard To See Beyond The Sort Of Haze Of Hatred That The Hindu Nationalists Had Been Spreading.

It Is Only Now, These Years Later, That Rahel With Adult Hindsight Recognized The Sweetness Of That Gesture. A Grown Man Entertaining Three Raccoons, Treating Them Like Real Ladies. Instinctively Colluding In The Conspiracy Of Their Fiction, Taking Care Not To Decimate It With Adult Carelessness. Or Affection. It Is After All So Easy To Shatter A Story. To Break A Chain Of Thought. To Ruin A Fragment Of A Dream Being Carried Around Carefully Like A Piece Of Porcelain. To Let It Be, To Travel With It, As Velutha Did, Is Much The Harder Thing To Do.

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

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 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.

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