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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.

-Arundhati Roy

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When She Looked At

Arundhati Roy

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

Power Is Fortified Not Just By What It Destroys, But Also By What It Creates. Not Just By What It Takes, But Also By What It Gives. And Powerlessness Reaffirmed Not Just By The Helplessness Of Those Who Have Lost, But Also By The Gratitude Of Those Who Have (or Think They Have) Gained.

...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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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

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

His Gratitude Widened His Smile And Bent His Back.

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.

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

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

Change Is One Thing. Acceptance Is Another.

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.

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

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

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

I'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.

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

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

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

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

It's Being Made Out That The Whole Point Of The War Was To Topple The Taliban Regime And Liberate Afghan Women From Their Burqas, We Are Being Asked To Believe That The U.s. Marines Are Actually On A Feminist Mission.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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

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Things Can Change In A Day.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I Don't Have The Big Idea. I Don't Have The Arrogance To Even Want To Have The Big Idea. But I Believe The Physics Of Resisting Power Is As Old As The Physics Of Accumulating Power. That's What Keeps The Balance In The Universe... The Refusal To Obey.

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People Say To Me, Oh, It's So Wonderful That You're Writing About Real Things, And That It's A Political Thing To Do, And I Say, Look-to Be In My Position And Not Say Anything Is A Hell Of A Political Thing. You Need To Think Politically, Otherwise You'll Be One Of These People Who Says, Oh, This Person's Saying This And That Person's Saying That, And I'm Confused. And I Say, Yeah, Because You Want To Be Confused.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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

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

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

I Feel Ashamed That The New, Nuclear, Neo-liberal India Thinks Of Itself As A 'natural Ally' Of Israel. Ever Since India Began To Call Itself An Emerging Superpower, It Has Become A Slavish, Groveling Satellite State Of The Us.

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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.

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).

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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.

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.

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 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 Invasion Of Iraq Will Surely Go Down In History As One Of The Most Cowardly Wars Ever Fought. It Was A War In Which A Band Of Rich Nations, Armed With Enough Nuclear Weapons To Destroy The World Several Times Over, Rounded On A Poor Nation, Falsely Accused It Of Having Nuclear Weapons, Used The United Nations To Force It To Disarm, Then Invaded It, Occupied It, And Are Now In The Process Of Selling It.

Money Need Not Be Our Only Reward.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

India Lives In Several Centuries At The Same Time.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

With The Certitude Of A True Believer, Vellya Paapen Had Assured The Twins That There Was No Such Thing In The World As A Black Cat. He Said That There Were Only Black Cat Chaped Holes In The Universe.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

In India, We Have A Right Wing That Is So Vicious And So Openly Wicked, Which Is The Baratiya Janata Party (bjp), And Then We Have The Congress Party, Which Does Almost Worse Things, But Does It By Night. And People Feel That The Only Choices They Have Are To Vote For This Or For That. And My Point Is That, Whoever You Vote For, It Doesn't Have To Consume All The Oxygen In The Political Debate.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

People Always Loved Best What They Identified Most With.

Old. A Viable Die-able Age.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

The 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.

Some Things Come With Their Own Punishments.

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.

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.

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.

The Idea Of "human Rights," For Example - Sometimes It Bothers Me. Not In Itself, But Because The Concept Of Human Rights Has Replaced The Much Grander Idea Of Justice.

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.

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.

Poverty Is A Crime And The Poor Are Terrorists

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Anything's Possible In Human Nature," Chacko Said In His Reading Aloud Voice. Talking To The Darkness Now, Suddenly Insensitive To His Little Fountain-haired Niece. "love. Madness. Hope. Infinite Joy." Of The Four Things That Were Possible In Human Nature, Rahel Thought That Infinnate Joy Sounded The Saddest. Perhaps Because Of The Way Chacko Said It. Infinnate Joy. With A Church Sound To It. Like A Sad Fish With Fins All Over.

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

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

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

In A Country Like India, The British Were Only Able To Rule The Country Because It Had Completely Co-opted The Elite Of The Country, Who Did Their Work For Them.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Delhi Is A Very Maligned City, And Deservedly So. Yet There's Something About It. It's A Secret City, It Doesn't Hang Out Its Wares. It's Like A Very Deep River. Floating Right Up On Top Are The Institutions Of Contemporary Power: Government, Politics, Media, And Then There's The Bureaucracy, The Diplomatic Missions. But It's Also The City Of Intellectual Debate, Of Protest, It's The City Where People From All Over The Country Converge To Express Their Anger. And Then, Underneath All That, There's This Crumbling, Ancient City, A Confluence Of So Much History.

The Time Has Come For Everybody -capitalists, Communists, Socialists- To Ask Themselves What 'civilization' Really Means. If Not, Whether A Country Calls Itself Capitalist Or Communists, In The Pursuit Of 'progress' , It Will Visit Genocide Either On Its Own People Or On Another People Whose Country Must Be Plundered For Resources To Feed The Progress Industry.

Thousands Of Years Of Ideological, Philosophical And Practical Decisions Were Made. They Altered The Surface Of The Earth, The Coordinates Of Our Souls. For Every One Of Those Decisions, Maybe There's Another Decision That Could Have Been Made, Should Have Been Made.

Human Rights Takes History Out Of Justice.

Acceptance Spells Death To A Writer.

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.

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.

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

Humans Are Animals Of Habit.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Excitement Always Leads To Tears.

The Indian Government Has Managed To Turn The Concept Of Nonviolence On Its Head. Nonviolent Resistance And Nonviolent Governance. Unlike, Say, China Or Turkey Or Indonesia, India Doesn't Mow Down Its People. It Doesn't Kill People Who Are Refusing To Move. It Just Waits It Out. It Continues To Do What It Has To Do And Ignores The Consequences.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I Firstly Don't Think Of Myself As An Activist, I Never Have. I Always Say That, I Think This Word "activist" Is Relatively Recent One. I Don't Remember When People Started Being Called That Or What It Means. It Reduces Both Writers And Activists, It Makes It Seem As Though A Writer's Job Is To Just Keep People Entertained With Best-selling Books And The Activist's Job To Keep On Repeating The Same Thing Without A Great Deal Of Subtlety And Intelligence. I Don't Think Either Is The Case.

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.

I Am Very Conscious That, From The Time Of The God Of Small Things Was Published 10 Years Ago, We Are In A Different World ... Which Needs To Be Written About Differently, And I Really Very Much Want To Do That.

Fascism Itself Can Only Be Turned Away If All Those Who Are Outraged By It Show A Commitment To Social Justice That Equals The Intensity Of Their Indignation.

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

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.

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