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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.

-Arundhati Roy

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They All Broke The

Arundhati Roy

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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.

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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'.

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.

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.

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.

...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.

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.

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).

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 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?

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

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

His Gratitude Widened His Smile And Bent His Back.

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

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

The Only Thing Worth Globalizing Is Dissent.

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.

Human Rights Takes History Out Of Justice.

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

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.

I Grew Up In A Little Village In Kerala. It Was A Nightmare For Me. All I Wanted To Do Was To Escape, To Get Out, To Never Have To Marry Somebody There. Of Course, They Were Not Dying To Marry Me. I Was The Worst Thing A Girl Could Be: Thin, Black, And Clever.

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

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.

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.

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

Talk Loud Enough About Human Rights And It Gives The Impression Of Democracy At Work, Justice At Work. There Was A Time When The United States Waged War To Topple Democracies, Because Back Then Democracy Was A Threat To The Free Market. Countries Were Nationalising Their Resources, Protecting Their Markets.... So Then, Real Democracies Were Being Toppled. They Were Toppled In Iran, They Were Toppled All Across Latin America, Chile.

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

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

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.

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

Literature Is The Opposite Of A Nuclear Bomb.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

If You Look At The History Of The Ford Foundation And Rockefeller, In Latin America, In Indonesia, Where Almost A Million People, Mainly Communists, Were Killed By General Suharto, Who Was Backed By The Cia, In South Africa, In The Us Civil Rights Movement - Or Even Now, It's Very Disturbing. They Have Always Worked Closely With The Us State Department.

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

Anyway, What Is A Country? When People Say, "tell Me About India," I Say, "which India?.... The Land Of Poetry And Mad Rebellion? The One That Produces Haunting Music And Exquisite Textiles? The One That Invented The Caste System And Celebrates The Genocide Of Muslims And Sikhs And The Lynching Of Dalits? The Country Of Dollar Billionaires? Or The One In Which 800 Million Live On Less Than Half-a-dollar A Day? Which India?"

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.

Your Enemies Are Always Manufactured To Suit Your Purpose, Right? How Can You Have A Good Enemy? You Have To Have An Utterly Evil Enemy - And Then The Evilness Has To Progress.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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Digital Revolution

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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?

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.

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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.

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.

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.

Some Things Come With Their Own Punishments.

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.

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.

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?

This Is A Diseased Century. We Diagnosed The Disease And Its Causes With Microscopic Exactness, But Whenever We Applied The Healing Knife A New Sore Appeared. Our Will Was Hard And Pure, We Should Have Been Loved By The People, But They Hate Us. Why Are We So Odious And Detested? We Brought You Truth And In Our Mouth It Sounded Like A Lie. We Brought You Freedom, And It Looks In Our Hands Like A Whip. We Brought You The Living Life, And Where Our Voice Is Heard The Trees Wither And There Is A Rustling Of Dry Leaves. We Brought You The Promise Of The Future, But Our Tongue Stammered And Barked.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Change Is One Thing. Acceptance Is Another.

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

I 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

In Delhi The Cars Are Getting Bigger And Sleeker, The Hotels Are Getting Posher, The Gates Are Getting Higher, And The Guards Are No Longer The Old Chowkidars, The Watchmen, But They Are Fellows With Guns. And Yet The Poor Are Packed Into Every Crevice Like Lice In The City. People Don't See That Anymore. It's As If You Shine A Light Very Brightly In One Place, The Darkness Deepens Around.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

India Lives In Several Centuries At The Same Time.

Use Your Art To Fight.

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

Complicated Relationship

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.

Democracy No Longer Means What It Was Meant To. It Has Been Taken Back Into The Workshop. Each Of Its Institutions Has Been Hollowed Out, And It Has Been Returned To Us As A Vehicle For The Free Market, Of The Corporations. For The Corporations, By The Corporations.

I Am A Woman Who Is A Granddaughter Of A Lady Who Used To Be Beaten On The Head By Her Husband, Of A Mother Who Went Through Hell Because She Was Divorced And Had To Bring Up These Kids. And I Can Take 10 Men Out To Lunch And Pay The Bill, And Nobody Even Thinks Twice About It. So Don’t Mess With Me.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Human Rights Are Fundamental Rights, They Are The Minimum, The Very Least We Demand. Too Often, They Become The Goal Itself. What Should Be The Minimum Becomes The Maximum - All We Are Supposed To Expect - But Human Rights Aren't Enough. The Goal Is, And Must Always Be, Justice.

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

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.

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.

Excitement Always Leads To Tears.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Money Need Not Be Our Only Reward.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

If 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I Need Fiction Like You Need To Eat Or Exercise.

Things Can Change In A Day.

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.

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

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.

Snowden Is The Thoughtful, Courageous Saint Of Liberal Reform. And Julian Assange Is A Sort Of Radical, Feral Prophet Who Has Been Prowling This Wilderness Since He Was 16 Years Old.

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

The 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.

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.

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

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

Old. A Viable Die-able Age.

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 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.

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

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.

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

He Could Do Only One Thing At A Time. If He Held Her, He Couldn't Kiss Her. If He Kissed Her, He Couldn't See Her. If He Saw Her, He Couldn't Feel Her.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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....

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.

So Far As We Are Concerned, There Is Not One Word In The Statements That I Have Made In This Council Which Can Be Interpreted To Mean That We Will Not Honour International Obligations. I Want To Say For The Purpose Of The Record That There Is Nothing That Has Been Said On Behalf Of The Government Of India Which In The Slightest Degree Indicates That The Government Of India Or The Union Of India Will Dishonour Any International Obligations It Has Undertaken.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Every People, Every Society, Needs A Culture Of Resistance, A Culture Of Being Difficult And Disobedient, That Is The Only Way They Will Ever Be Able To Stand Up To The Inevitable Abuse Of Power By Whoever Runs The State Apparatus, The Capitalists, The Communists, The Socialists, The Gandhians, Whoever.

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

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