Arundhati Roy's Blog, page 4
January 8, 2012
Jan Lokpal Bill unGandhian
Writer Arundhati Roy at a book launch function in Chennai on Saturday. Photo: M.VedhanDescribing most of the anti-corruption movements in the country as right-wing and majoritarian in nature, writer Arundhati Roy on Saturday said the Jan Lokpal Bill, which she said nobody had read, was totally an unGandhian piece of legislation. She alleged that it would concentrate power in the hands of a few.Ms. Roy, who was here in connection with the release of a Tamil translation of her work Broken Republic published by Kalachuvadu, said a very strong anti-corruption law would always be a tool in the hands of the middle class to take advantage of the poor, who had already been alienated.
She stressed the need to view the anti-corruption movements in the country in the backdrop of the attempt to corporatise people's struggles and to turn people's anger into a blind alley.Asked for a solution to the Maoist problem in the country, she wanted to know what would be the solution to the Indian government and its Prime Minister and Home Minister openly speaking about violating the Constitution, which she said "does not allow taking away the adivasis' lands and handing them over to corporate houses."
She also wondered how one could preach to a person on giving up violence and following the Gandhian path when his hut was surrounded by CRPF men and women were raped.Pointing to various struggles launched by the people across the country including the fight against the Nuclear Power Plant in Kudankulam, she said "to me these battles were somehow more profound than the battle for self-determination and ethnic nationalism."
source :http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article2783790.ece
January 3, 2012
December 15, 2011
"Europe is just the beginning"
The end of capitalism is coming. Of these, the Indian writer Arundhati Roy is convinced. And the rich get themselves off from the poor - by force of arms.
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The writer Arundhati Roy TIME: How the Indian observer looks from a distance on the European crisis?
Arundhati Roy: Of course, the situation is precarious. The poor of Europe has seized the rage, and the actions of their governments can no longer move. Like wildfire the crisis from one country to the other seems to spill over. It seems to me here, as if the powers that be in Europe - including the big media specifically - too scared to face the crisis seriously. They still believe that bailouts and police actions to solve the problems. Thus they possibly win breathers.
TIME: Loses the enlightened social consciousness of Europeans now its charm?
Roy: At this charm was never reliable. While Europe developed once for his ideas of freedom and equality, it colonized other countries, committed genocide and slavery practiced - in unimaginable dimensions. Whole nations have been destroyed. The Belgians in the Congo brought by ten million people. The Germans exterminated the Hereros in West Africa.
TIME: But what does that have unnerved even to do with the Europe of today?
Roy: slow, wait. The genocides were the procurement of raw materials for an industrial revolution that established the Western capitalism and with it produced the surplus material, on whose basis the ideas of modern democracy. This, however, capitalism has created our current crisis that is both economical and environmental.
TIME: Can Europe help for today only if it same abolish capitalism? Is not it easier?
Roy: It would be nice. But swimming in our oceans will soon no longer fish. Everywhere in the world falling water tables. The rain forests are being destroyed in order to breed cattle. All this shows just how short-sighted and narrow-minded was the west-European definition of freedom and equality yet. She was always at the expense of others.
TIME: Go for Indians and Chinese are now better deal with nature?
Roy: Yes. I will not say. Indian culture can be just as despotic, see the caste system. I want also to European ideas do not deny their value - but their implementation in practice under the conditions of capitalist profit accumulation and Europe has led us all to the point where we are today: not far away from collapse.
TIME: But nevertheless, there has been a European model: the EU as an association of nations that have renounced the war. This model still shines beyond Europe?
Roy: This model was originally founded on two world wars and the Holocaust. But today it seems to me, as if the European Union held together by material values, the promise of a good life for all. But this promise is now overshadowed by tensions and divisions are therefore virtually certain. Also, India is a union of many peoples, perhaps even more diverse than the whole of Europe. But keeps us together, especially at the edges in Kashmir and the North East, the Indian Army. But as the world moves today, I find it hard enough, in-country or even to think Union's borders.
TIME: Are Europe and India are not too big to be governable yet?
Roy: The Mighty think today is neither European nor Indian, but globally. Our governments are still far from controlling banks and multinational companies. It seems to me sometimes as if the elites of all our countries in space, a nation founded. From there, they look down upon the world as to servants' quarters. Are there any protest, they send armies, police and supervisory personnel, with their soldiers and police work together and exchange all their secret knowledge to control the servants. But despite all the servants are getting restless. On the horizon glow uprisings. In the U.S., where I was just longer, the language has changed on the road. This was previously unimaginable.
TIME: Set around a new protest movement in the West?
Roy: Who would have thought that American students, which has been made to believe that to believe in socialism is more dangerous than AIDS, suddenly go with slogans against the "class war" on the road?
TIME: Do you believe that, the crisis in Europe and the United States a new chance for the poor of this world?
Roy: This crisis affects not just the poor, it is also a crisis of the rich. Things can not continue. The old way no longer works. In the U.S., 400 people have as much as half the U.S. population. In India, over 100 people have property worth 25 percent of the gross national product. Without major changes, this system will collapse.
TIME: Are then all poorer? Or will spread the wealth more fairly?
Roy: It will either be a complete collapse, or there are militarized zones where only the rich can live under guard, in order to ward off any kind of resistance - from peaceful to militant on terrorism. These battles are fought today in India already. The question is whether the imagination, which made many of these problems only arise at some point may contribute to their solution. But I do not think so.
TIME: So you think that is no longer in crisis management, but to revolution?
Roy: We need new imagination, a new definition of the meaning of progress, a new definition of freedom, equality, civilization and happiness on earth. The period of unrestricted individualism is over. And I plead not for a moral renewal or appeal to the good side of people. I just say: Make it look like things will happen. Europe is only the beginning.
* The article has been automatically translated online from German to English. Any errors are purely due to it
Source:
http://www.zeit.de/2011/51/Interview-Roy/komplettansicht
December 7, 2011
Listen to Arundhati Roy, Derrick Jensen, & more and Fund the Resistance!
*THE VIDEO OF THIS EVENT IS ALREADY PUT UP ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwy0yvhstS0 (Part 1 of 7)
Throughout history all resistance movements have faced ruthless enemies that had unlimited resources. That's why all resistance movements count on loyalty and material support. And, unlike the past, now everything's at stake. We are battling those who are destroying the planet for their profit. Not all of us can participate on the frontlines. But we all can contribute at some level.
Below is our gift to you. Listen online or download all of the speaker's talks at this year's Earth at Risk event, and if you feel moved to do so contribute to Fund Deep Green Resistance.
It's time to fund the Resistance. Here's your opportunity to support a movement that won't stop at symbolic or direct action. Deep Green Resistance evaluates strategic options for resistance, from nonviolence to underground sabotage, and the conditions required for those options to be successful. We leave nothing off the table. DGR's strategy will use any means necessary to stop the destruction of the planet while there is still time left. In a short time, DGR has already expanded into more than 15 chapters worldwide, and the movement is growing fast.Deep Green Resistance has a plan of action for anyone determined to fight for this planet….and win. With your support, no matter how small the amount, you can be part of winning this fight once and for all. Listen to or Download Earth at Risk Speakers Here
On November 13th, 2011, Earth at Risk was held in Berkeley, CA. Hundreds attended and thousands watched by livestream online. Below, you can listen to and even download these conversations between Derrick Jensen and seven important thinkers, writers, and activists who each hold an impassioned critique of this culture and who offer ideas on what can be done to build a real resistance movement.
Our planet is under serious threat from industrial civilization. Yet most activists are not considering strategies that might actually prevent the looming biotic collapse the Earth is facing. We need to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet. We need a serious resistance movement that includes all levels of direct action–action that can match the scale of the problem.
Arundhati Roy Part 1
Arundhati Roy Part 2
Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She has worked as a film designer and screenplay writer in India. Roy is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize. The novel has been translated into dozens of languages worldwide. She has written several non-fiction books, including The Cost of Living, Power Politics, War Talk, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, and Public Power in the Age of Empire. Roy was featured in the BBC television documentary Dam/age, which is about the struggle against big dams in India. A collection of interviews with Arundhati Roy by David Barsamian was published as The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile. Her new book is Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, and she is a contributor to the forthcoming Verso anthology Kashmir: The Case for Freedom. Penguin will be publishing her book Walking with the Comrades in October 2011. Roy is the recipient of the 2002 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize.
Q and A with Jensen and Roy
Derrick Jensen and Arundhati Roy answer questions from the Earth at Risk audience.
Source:
http://deepgreenresistance.org/earspeakeraudio/
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwy0yvhstS0 (Part 1 of 7)
Throughout history all resistance movements have faced ruthless enemies that had unlimited resources. That's why all resistance movements count on loyalty and material support. And, unlike the past, now everything's at stake. We are battling those who are destroying the planet for their profit. Not all of us can participate on the frontlines. But we all can contribute at some level.
Below is our gift to you. Listen online or download all of the speaker's talks at this year's Earth at Risk event, and if you feel moved to do so contribute to Fund Deep Green Resistance.
It's time to fund the Resistance. Here's your opportunity to support a movement that won't stop at symbolic or direct action. Deep Green Resistance evaluates strategic options for resistance, from nonviolence to underground sabotage, and the conditions required for those options to be successful. We leave nothing off the table. DGR's strategy will use any means necessary to stop the destruction of the planet while there is still time left. In a short time, DGR has already expanded into more than 15 chapters worldwide, and the movement is growing fast.Deep Green Resistance has a plan of action for anyone determined to fight for this planet….and win. With your support, no matter how small the amount, you can be part of winning this fight once and for all. Listen to or Download Earth at Risk Speakers Here
On November 13th, 2011, Earth at Risk was held in Berkeley, CA. Hundreds attended and thousands watched by livestream online. Below, you can listen to and even download these conversations between Derrick Jensen and seven important thinkers, writers, and activists who each hold an impassioned critique of this culture and who offer ideas on what can be done to build a real resistance movement.
Our planet is under serious threat from industrial civilization. Yet most activists are not considering strategies that might actually prevent the looming biotic collapse the Earth is facing. We need to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet. We need a serious resistance movement that includes all levels of direct action–action that can match the scale of the problem.
Arundhati Roy Part 1
Arundhati Roy Part 2
Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She has worked as a film designer and screenplay writer in India. Roy is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize. The novel has been translated into dozens of languages worldwide. She has written several non-fiction books, including The Cost of Living, Power Politics, War Talk, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, and Public Power in the Age of Empire. Roy was featured in the BBC television documentary Dam/age, which is about the struggle against big dams in India. A collection of interviews with Arundhati Roy by David Barsamian was published as The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile. Her new book is Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, and she is a contributor to the forthcoming Verso anthology Kashmir: The Case for Freedom. Penguin will be publishing her book Walking with the Comrades in October 2011. Roy is the recipient of the 2002 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize.
Q and A with Jensen and Roy
Derrick Jensen and Arundhati Roy answer questions from the Earth at Risk audience.
Source:
http://deepgreenresistance.org/earspeakeraudio/
December 6, 2011
December 5, 2011
Arundhati Roy Earth At Risk Video
Acknowledgment:
Thank you Fatima Arif for formatting and uploading the video to our you tube channel
Copyright rests with Earth At Risk
December 4, 2011
November 29, 2011
Arundhati Roy: 'The people who created the crisis will not be the ones that come up with a solution'
The prize-winning author of The God of Small Things talks about why she is drawn to the Occupy movement and the need to reclaim language and meaning
Arundhati Roy: 'The expropriators should have their wealth expropriated.' Photograph: Sarah Lee
Sitting in a car parked at a gas station on the outskirts of Houston, Texas, my colleague Michelle holds an audio recorder to my cellphone. At the other end of the line is Arundhati Roy, author of the Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things, who is some 2,000 miles away, driving to Boston.
"This is uniquely American," I remark to Roy about interviewing her while both in cars but thousands of miles apart. Having driven some 7,000 miles and visited 23 cities (and counting) in reporting on the Occupy movement, it's become apparent that the US is essentially an oil-based economy in which we shuttle goods we no longer make around a continental land mass, creating poverty-level dead-end jobs in the service sector.
This is the secret behind the Occupy Wall Street movement that Roy visited before the police crackdowns started. Sure, ending pervasive corporate control of the political system is on the lips of almost every occupier we meet. But this is nothing new. What's different is most Americans now live in poverty, on the edge, or fear a descent into the abyss. It's why a majority (at least of those who have an opinion) still support Occupy Wall Street even after weeks of disinformation and repression.
In this exclusive interview for the Guardian, Roy offers her thoughts on Occupy Wall Street, the role of the imagination, reclaiming language, and what is next for a movement that has reshaped America's political discourse and seized the world's attention.
AG: Why did you want to visit Occupy Wall Street and what are your impressions of it?
AR: How could I not want to visit? Given what I've been doing for so many years, it seems to me, intellectually and theoretically, quite predictable this was going to happen here at some point. But still I cannot deny myself the surprise and delight that it has happened. And I wanted to, obviously, see for myself the extent and size and texture and nature of it. So the first time I went there, because all those tents were up, it seemed more like a squat than a protest to me, but it began to reveal itself in a while. Some people were holding the ground and it was the hub for other people to organise, to think through things. As I said when I spoke at the People's University, it seems to me to be introducing a new political language into the United States, a language that would be considered blasphemous only a while ago.
AG: Do you think that the Occupy movement should be defined by occupying one particular space or by occupying spaces?
AR: I don't think the whole protest is only about occupying physical territory, but about reigniting a new political imagination. 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. The fact that in New York and other places where people are being beaten and evicted suggests nervousness and confusion in the ruling establishment. I think the 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.
AG: At the same, occupying public spaces did capture the public imagination. Why do you think that is?
AR: I think you had a whole subcutaneous discontent that these movements suddenly began to epitomise. 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.
AG: You mentioned that they are under attack. Dozens of occupations have been shut down, evicted, at least temporarily, in the last week. What do you see as the next phase for this movement?
AR: I don't know whether I'm qualified to answer that, because I'm not somebody who spends a lot of time here in the United States, but I suspect that it will keep reassembling in different ways and the anger created by the repression will, in fact, expand the movement. But eventually, the greater danger to the movement is that it may dovetail into the presidential election campaign that's coming up. I've seen that happen before in the antiwar movement here, and I see it happening all the time in India. Eventually, all the energy goes into trying to campaign for the "better guy", in this case Barack Obama, who's actually expanding wars all over the world. 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.
AG: Your essays, such as "The Greater Common Good" and "Walking with the Comrades", concern corporations, the military and state violently occupying other people's lands in India. How do those occupations and resistances relate to the Occupy Wall Street movement?
AR: 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. Ever since the Great Depression, we know that one of the key ways in which the US economy has stimulated growth is by manufacturing weapons and exporting war to other countries. So, whether this movement is a movement for justice for the excluded in the United States, or whether it is a movement against an international system of global finance that is manufacturing levels of hunger and poverty on an unimaginable scale, remains to be seen.
AG: You've written about the need for a different imagination than that of capitalism. Can you talk about that?
AR: 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. Thousands are losing their jobs and homes, while corporations are being bailed out with billions of dollars.
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. Money need not be our only reward. 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.
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.
AG: What would the different imagination look like?
AR: The home minister of India has said that he wants 70% of the Indian population in the cities, which means moving something like 500 million people off their land. That cannot be done without India turning into a military state. But 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.
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. And this battle demands that the world see that, at some stage, as the water tables are dropping and the minerals that remain in the mountains are being taken out, we are going to confront a crisis from which we cannot return. The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution.
That is why 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.
AG: In the United States, as I'm sure you're aware, political discourse is obsessed with the middle class, but the Occupy movement has made the poor and homeless visible for the first time in decades in the public discourse. Could you comment on that?
AR: It's so much a reversal of what you see in India. 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. Whereas, here, 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 movement will have to somehow formulate something more than just anger.
AG: As a writer, what do you make of the term "occupation", which has now somehow been reclaimed as a positive term when it's always been one of the most heinous terms in political language?
AR: 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. So I think that turning the word "occupation" on its head would be a good thing, though I would say that it needs a little more work. 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.
AG: As a novelist, you write a lot in terms of motivations and how characters interpret reality. Around the country, many occupiers we've talked to seem unable to reconcile their desires about Obama with what Obama really represents. When I talk to them about Obama's record, they say, "Oh, his hands are tied; the Republicans are to blame, it's not his fault." Why do you think people react like this, even at the occupations?
AR: Even in India, we have the same problem. 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. It's just an artificial theatre, which in a way is designed to subsume the anger and to make you feel that this is all that you're supposed to think about and talk about, when, in fact, you're trapped between two kinds of washing powder that are owned by the same company.
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.
AG: So it's also a failure of the imagination?
AR: It's walking into a pretty elaborate trap. But it happens everywhere, and it will continue to happen. Even I know that if I go back to India, and tomorrow the BJP comes to power, personally I'll be in a lot more trouble than with the Congress [party] in power. But systemically, in terms of what is being done, there's no difference, because they collaborate completely, all the time. So I'm not going to waste even three minutes of my time, if I have to speak, asking people to vote for this one or for that one.
AG: One question that a lot of people have asked me: when is your next novel coming out?
AR: I have no answer to that question … I really don't know. Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things. And here we are with our crash helmets on, with concertina wire all around us.
AG: So this inspires you, as a novelist, the movement?
AR: Well, it comforts me, let's just say. I feel in so many ways rewarded for having done what I did, along with hundreds of other people, even the times when it seemed futile.
• Michelle Fawcett contributed to this article. She and Arun Gupta are covering the Occupy movement nationwide for Salon, Alternet and other outlets. Their work is available at occupyusatoday.com
Source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/30/arundhati-roy-interview
Arundhati Roy: 'The expropriators should have their wealth expropriated.' Photograph: Sarah Lee
Sitting in a car parked at a gas station on the outskirts of Houston, Texas, my colleague Michelle holds an audio recorder to my cellphone. At the other end of the line is Arundhati Roy, author of the Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things, who is some 2,000 miles away, driving to Boston.
"This is uniquely American," I remark to Roy about interviewing her while both in cars but thousands of miles apart. Having driven some 7,000 miles and visited 23 cities (and counting) in reporting on the Occupy movement, it's become apparent that the US is essentially an oil-based economy in which we shuttle goods we no longer make around a continental land mass, creating poverty-level dead-end jobs in the service sector.
This is the secret behind the Occupy Wall Street movement that Roy visited before the police crackdowns started. Sure, ending pervasive corporate control of the political system is on the lips of almost every occupier we meet. But this is nothing new. What's different is most Americans now live in poverty, on the edge, or fear a descent into the abyss. It's why a majority (at least of those who have an opinion) still support Occupy Wall Street even after weeks of disinformation and repression.
In this exclusive interview for the Guardian, Roy offers her thoughts on Occupy Wall Street, the role of the imagination, reclaiming language, and what is next for a movement that has reshaped America's political discourse and seized the world's attention.
AG: Why did you want to visit Occupy Wall Street and what are your impressions of it?
AR: How could I not want to visit? Given what I've been doing for so many years, it seems to me, intellectually and theoretically, quite predictable this was going to happen here at some point. But still I cannot deny myself the surprise and delight that it has happened. And I wanted to, obviously, see for myself the extent and size and texture and nature of it. So the first time I went there, because all those tents were up, it seemed more like a squat than a protest to me, but it began to reveal itself in a while. Some people were holding the ground and it was the hub for other people to organise, to think through things. As I said when I spoke at the People's University, it seems to me to be introducing a new political language into the United States, a language that would be considered blasphemous only a while ago.
AG: Do you think that the Occupy movement should be defined by occupying one particular space or by occupying spaces?
AR: I don't think the whole protest is only about occupying physical territory, but about reigniting a new political imagination. 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. The fact that in New York and other places where people are being beaten and evicted suggests nervousness and confusion in the ruling establishment. I think the 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.
AG: At the same, occupying public spaces did capture the public imagination. Why do you think that is?
AR: I think you had a whole subcutaneous discontent that these movements suddenly began to epitomise. 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.
AG: You mentioned that they are under attack. Dozens of occupations have been shut down, evicted, at least temporarily, in the last week. What do you see as the next phase for this movement?
AR: I don't know whether I'm qualified to answer that, because I'm not somebody who spends a lot of time here in the United States, but I suspect that it will keep reassembling in different ways and the anger created by the repression will, in fact, expand the movement. But eventually, the greater danger to the movement is that it may dovetail into the presidential election campaign that's coming up. I've seen that happen before in the antiwar movement here, and I see it happening all the time in India. Eventually, all the energy goes into trying to campaign for the "better guy", in this case Barack Obama, who's actually expanding wars all over the world. 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.
AG: Your essays, such as "The Greater Common Good" and "Walking with the Comrades", concern corporations, the military and state violently occupying other people's lands in India. How do those occupations and resistances relate to the Occupy Wall Street movement?
AR: 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. Ever since the Great Depression, we know that one of the key ways in which the US economy has stimulated growth is by manufacturing weapons and exporting war to other countries. So, whether this movement is a movement for justice for the excluded in the United States, or whether it is a movement against an international system of global finance that is manufacturing levels of hunger and poverty on an unimaginable scale, remains to be seen.
AG: You've written about the need for a different imagination than that of capitalism. Can you talk about that?
AR: 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. Thousands are losing their jobs and homes, while corporations are being bailed out with billions of dollars.
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. Money need not be our only reward. 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.
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.
AG: What would the different imagination look like?
AR: The home minister of India has said that he wants 70% of the Indian population in the cities, which means moving something like 500 million people off their land. That cannot be done without India turning into a military state. But 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.
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. And this battle demands that the world see that, at some stage, as the water tables are dropping and the minerals that remain in the mountains are being taken out, we are going to confront a crisis from which we cannot return. The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution.
That is why 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.
AG: In the United States, as I'm sure you're aware, political discourse is obsessed with the middle class, but the Occupy movement has made the poor and homeless visible for the first time in decades in the public discourse. Could you comment on that?
AR: It's so much a reversal of what you see in India. 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. Whereas, here, 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 movement will have to somehow formulate something more than just anger.
AG: As a writer, what do you make of the term "occupation", which has now somehow been reclaimed as a positive term when it's always been one of the most heinous terms in political language?
AR: 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. So I think that turning the word "occupation" on its head would be a good thing, though I would say that it needs a little more work. 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.
AG: As a novelist, you write a lot in terms of motivations and how characters interpret reality. Around the country, many occupiers we've talked to seem unable to reconcile their desires about Obama with what Obama really represents. When I talk to them about Obama's record, they say, "Oh, his hands are tied; the Republicans are to blame, it's not his fault." Why do you think people react like this, even at the occupations?
AR: Even in India, we have the same problem. 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. It's just an artificial theatre, which in a way is designed to subsume the anger and to make you feel that this is all that you're supposed to think about and talk about, when, in fact, you're trapped between two kinds of washing powder that are owned by the same company.
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.
AG: So it's also a failure of the imagination?
AR: It's walking into a pretty elaborate trap. But it happens everywhere, and it will continue to happen. Even I know that if I go back to India, and tomorrow the BJP comes to power, personally I'll be in a lot more trouble than with the Congress [party] in power. But systemically, in terms of what is being done, there's no difference, because they collaborate completely, all the time. So I'm not going to waste even three minutes of my time, if I have to speak, asking people to vote for this one or for that one.
AG: One question that a lot of people have asked me: when is your next novel coming out?
AR: I have no answer to that question … I really don't know. Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things. And here we are with our crash helmets on, with concertina wire all around us.
AG: So this inspires you, as a novelist, the movement?
AR: Well, it comforts me, let's just say. I feel in so many ways rewarded for having done what I did, along with hundreds of other people, even the times when it seemed futile.
• Michelle Fawcett contributed to this article. She and Arun Gupta are covering the Occupy movement nationwide for Salon, Alternet and other outlets. Their work is available at occupyusatoday.com
Source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/30/arundhati-roy-interview
November 27, 2011
Arundhati Roy's Walking With the Comrades
What's it like living in the jungle with Maoist guerrillas? Arundhati Roy sat down with The Daily Beast to discuss the lengths she went to tell the story of a hidden battle between guerrillas and the Indian government
Copyright : DailyBeast TV
http://www.thedailybeast.com/videos/2011/11/11/arundhati-roy-s-walking-with-the-comrades.html
November 25, 2011
Happy 50th birthday, Arundhati Roy
Sandip Roy
Nov 24, 2011
Arundhati Roy always speaks her mind even when she knows it will win her no friends. Reuters
Arundhati Roy turns 50 today. (Team Note: Correction she was born in 1959 and not 1961)
She probably was not expecting a PIL in a Jammu court for her comments on Kashmir as a birthday present. But being Arundhati Roy, she is probably not too surprised.
If she read the weather report, somebody would find some reason to be upset about it. But on her birthday here are five reasons to be thankful for Arundhati Roy.
She is an equal opportunity offender: Arundhati Roy always speaks her mind even when she knows it will win her no friends. Over the years with every cause she's taken up, every essay she has written, she has probably lost friends. She is not afraid to be the person everyone loves to hate. She annoys us and forces us to stop sitting on the fence. She has lambasted Bush, Kerry, Congress, BJP, Anna Hazare, fundamentalists and liberals. " She spares no one.
Except, her critics say, militants, Maoists, terrorists. She is accused of being a hypocrite, taking on the Indian state in Kashmir but not the plight of the Pandits. But she has spoken about it in an
Getty Images.She is strident, unapologetic, shrill. And these are her virtues. She is not afraid to be the last protester standing.
She takes responsibility as a citizen: You may not agree with her. But in a democracy we always need that person who is willing to take the unpopular view. She is, writes Manu Joseph, Neo in The Matrix.
At a time when everyone wants to point fingers at everyone, from the UPA government to bureaucrats to the media for the malaise in the country, Roy is not afraid to look into the mirror. As we pat ourselves on the back endlessly about being the world's largest democracy, Roy asks the uncomfortable question in an interview with India Currents:
She lives outside Page 3. Arundhati Roy burst on our national scene as a star with the Booker Prize in 1996. She was smart, beautiful and photogenic. She could have cashed in on that for the rest of her career and been the toast of literary fests around the world. But she chose to march to her own drummer. Shoma Chaudhury
She lives her stories: Arundhati Roy has been accused of being an activist butterfly, a Janey-come-lately to various causes who then sucks up all the media oxygen. A western filmmaker making a documentary about dams was told she could get funding only if she could get Arundhati Roy in the film. The filmmaker capitulated and the film got made.
A picture of Roy when she had won the Booker Prize. Reuters.
But in an age where journalism comes out of Wikipedia and Google searches, Roy lives her stories. She goes into the forests and spends time with Maoist guerillas before she writes about them. You can accuse her of being too romantic in her view of them, or justifying their violence but you cannot accuse her of not getting her hands dirty in the pursuit of a story.
She has been accused of hypocrisy, of paying fines instead of slogging it out in jail. But she still goes the extra mile for her story. It is true that sometimes the story then becomes about Arundhati Roy not tribals, or Maoists or Kashmir. But she understands fully that she is a star and that sometimes causes need stars.
"Happy is a tinny middle-class word. We think it's our right to be happy. It comes in unexpected snatches," she once said.
Here's hoping for a little snatch of happiness today for Arundhati Roy.
Source:
http://www.firstpost.com/politics/happy-50th-arundhati-roy-139491.html/2
Arundhati Roy always speaks her mind even when she knows it will win her no friends. Reuters
Arundhati Roy turns 50 today. (Team Note: Correction she was born in 1959 and not 1961)
She probably was not expecting a PIL in a Jammu court for her comments on Kashmir as a birthday present. But being Arundhati Roy, she is probably not too surprised.
If she read the weather report, somebody would find some reason to be upset about it. But on her birthday here are five reasons to be thankful for Arundhati Roy.
She is an equal opportunity offender: Arundhati Roy always speaks her mind even when she knows it will win her no friends. Over the years with every cause she's taken up, every essay she has written, she has probably lost friends. She is not afraid to be the person everyone loves to hate. She annoys us and forces us to stop sitting on the fence. She has lambasted Bush, Kerry, Congress, BJP, Anna Hazare, fundamentalists and liberals. " She spares no one.
Except, her critics say, militants, Maoists, terrorists. She is accused of being a hypocrite, taking on the Indian state in Kashmir but not the plight of the Pandits. But she has spoken about it in an
It is the duty of the leaders of Kashmir's present struggle to get the Pandits to return. That needs more than rhetoric. Apart from it being the right thing to do, it would give them enormous moral capital. It would also help shape their vision of what kind of Kashmir they are fighting for.But she says there is a difference between Godhra and the riots in Gujarat. She always, unequivocally, draws a distinction between "a state-assisted pogrom against a people in a country and something that militants have done.
Getty Images.She is strident, unapologetic, shrill. And these are her virtues. She is not afraid to be the last protester standing.She takes responsibility as a citizen: You may not agree with her. But in a democracy we always need that person who is willing to take the unpopular view. She is, writes Manu Joseph, Neo in The Matrix.
She is, more than anything, an anomaly that completes the system, a system that not only made her but also needs her for its own balance and survival.Arundhati Roy can be accused of being uncompromising, of making the perfect the enemy of the good. But she takes responsibility for her country in a way few of us have the courage to.
At a time when everyone wants to point fingers at everyone, from the UPA government to bureaucrats to the media for the malaise in the country, Roy is not afraid to look into the mirror. As we pat ourselves on the back endlessly about being the world's largest democracy, Roy asks the uncomfortable question in an interview with India Currents:
But when I am a citizen of a democracy, I have to take responsibility for what the state I voted for does. Are people in a democracy more responsible for the acts of their elected government?
She lives outside Page 3. Arundhati Roy burst on our national scene as a star with the Booker Prize in 1996. She was smart, beautiful and photogenic. She could have cashed in on that for the rest of her career and been the toast of literary fests around the world. But she chose to march to her own drummer. Shoma Chaudhury
Watching her now, few will remember that Roy was first announced to the world by a breathless article in a leading Indian magazine. The year was 1996. Liberalisation was just five years old. An ebullient middle-class was looking for a mascot. Roy came tailor-made from heaven: she had an elfin beauty, a diamond flash in her nose, a mane of gorgeous hair, a romantic backstory and a manuscript that triggered an international bidding war. India loved her….Arundhati Roy was India's triumphant entry on the global stage. She was the princess at the ball.But this Cinderella chose to instead turn her back on the ball and instead show that the emperor had no clothes. In 1998, fresh from the Booker euphoria, she wrote The End of Imagination, her angry critique of India's nuclear bomb. That was her first act of "betrayal" and she hasn't stopped.
She lives her stories: Arundhati Roy has been accused of being an activist butterfly, a Janey-come-lately to various causes who then sucks up all the media oxygen. A western filmmaker making a documentary about dams was told she could get funding only if she could get Arundhati Roy in the film. The filmmaker capitulated and the film got made.
A picture of Roy when she had won the Booker Prize. Reuters.
But in an age where journalism comes out of Wikipedia and Google searches, Roy lives her stories. She goes into the forests and spends time with Maoist guerillas before she writes about them. You can accuse her of being too romantic in her view of them, or justifying their violence but you cannot accuse her of not getting her hands dirty in the pursuit of a story.
She has been accused of hypocrisy, of paying fines instead of slogging it out in jail. But she still goes the extra mile for her story. It is true that sometimes the story then becomes about Arundhati Roy not tribals, or Maoists or Kashmir. But she understands fully that she is a star and that sometimes causes need stars.
I know I will be a lightning conductor. I know the press will come. They will have to be accountable. On the other hand I'll also be a celebrity arriving on the scene. I went because you have to realise you can't always be pristine and say I am the Snow Queen and I will only do what is right for me. You have to take the shit.She is 100 percent Indian: In The Guardian, Leo Mirani posed the question:
Who would want to live in Arundhati Roy's India? Who would even want to read about Arundhati Roy's India? … Confronted with the relentlessly bleak picture she paints, one in which the only good guys are murderers and mercenaries, who can blame middle India for retreating into their iPods and tabloid newspapers?Well there is one person who for sure wants to live in India. And that is Arundhati Roy. I have seen Arundhati Roy on stage in Berkeley, the tumultuous applause that greets her. It almost feels like a cult, vibrating with some kind of Arundhati-aura. It makes you wonder why she keeps returning to India where she is routinely harassed, censured, accused of sedition, of being a traitor and trotted out on television shows to boost the ratings. She is like the red meat routinely served to a hungry rabble. She could easily be a princess in exile, lobbing self-righteous firebombs at the world's largest democracy. But she chooses to live in Delhi, in the heart of the beast. As she
I'm not going to explain my relationship with this country and its people. I am not a politician looking for brownie points.We could say Happy Birthday, Arundhati Roy. But then she's claimed she's never liked that word "happy."
"Happy is a tinny middle-class word. We think it's our right to be happy. It comes in unexpected snatches," she once said.
Here's hoping for a little snatch of happiness today for Arundhati Roy.
Source:
http://www.firstpost.com/politics/happy-50th-arundhati-roy-139491.html/2
