More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
They had met at a ‘debate’, by which Marxists mean a discussion where everyone is saying the same thing to people who have the same views.
She figures that what Ma plans to do, as a Maoist, is tell hunters and farmers who live in forests and villages that they can become happier hunters and farmers if they win independence from India and if they chase away every private company that tries to give them a lot of money for their land.
Ma thinks she can make Mr Mao work better in India than Mr Mao could make himself work in China.
There was a battle with cops in the forest. Malnourished tribals versus malnourished men in
uniform.
Many of the factory workers, farmers and tribal hunters Mother tried to save were eventually saved by private corporations who either bought their land or employed them. They were saved by semi-literate merchants who had no intentions of doing good but who did more good in the way of making money than Ma ever did. That hurts.
The old men of the Sangh would argue that such attacks are not entirely unnecessary. Fear is important. They have said that for decades. They are among those men who have not read Chanakya or Machiavelli but love the synopsis.
He has entered Gujarat. Damodarbhai country. A land of merchants where artistes are rare, at least among men.
She wishes they also got to know that the man in the car was once a Hindu Brahmin who converted to Islam. That is even better than white people converting to Islam because white people are like Brahmins to black and yellow and brown people, but white people who convert to Islam are usually just crazy. But the Brahmins, they are never crazy. As in a doctor would never say they are crazy. They always know what they are doing and they are very clever.
The emperor is a prophecy of the great ancient Hindus. He is half-history-half-biology, that is what Damodarbhai is.
Vaid is on his way to the Mumbai airport, which is five hours away. In Delhi, he has a string of events including a lecture on ‘How the Left Steals Compassion, Fiction and the Wound’.
‘When the elite of a system become the underclass in another system, they search for a moral cause to restore balance of power. This is popularly known as activism.
Upon finding the moral cause, the elite co-opt, enlist and employ naïve simpletons to fight the battle. Activism is always a retaliation of the elite, always couched in morals and always a feudal system where the strong employ the weak, the poor, the demented, the suicidal, the semi-literate and other losers of the society.’
Reporters will then tell, once again, his spectacular back story with no attributions at all because the source is AK himself.
The legends of men are the proof that they tend to overestimate the beauty of their own lies. What else can explain their lame fables when they could have spun almost anything about themselves?
There is probably a lot of truth in these stories. The Patriarch has worked with him closely. The man is not a sham. Three years ago, together they influenced a retired semi-literate army truck driver, who used to whip drunkards in his village, to go to Delhi, sit on a pavement and go on a fast-unto-death in protest against the corrupt government of the Gandhi dynasty.
adore. Some men are like that – even though they are alphas, everyone likes them. He even convinced the stingy old patriarchs to part with the money to build a right-wing think tank.
Friends, why are Muslims so filthy? Filth is disorder. What is disorder? Disorder is the rejection of order. It is not merely the rejection of beauty, of hygiene, of the law; filth is a deliberate rejection of the state. The filth and chaos of Muslim streets, my friends, is the rejection of everything we hold dear. We know this because once we, too, sought refuge in chaos. When the Mughals invaded us, broke our beautiful temples and destroyed our way of life, we withdrew into filth and ugliness. That was how we waged our war. That is how we protested. When the British invaded us, broke our
...more
Colaba. She takes them to meet P. Sathya, whose malady of interest is rural affairs. He is a serious humanitarian with an accidentally fashionable hairstyle. Like every philosophical thug of Miss Iyer, he despises large corporations, agriculture reforms, land reforms, biotechnology, and the fact that rich men wish to acquire land. He wants small farmers to remain small farmers, half-naked in their tiny hamlets. He has, of course, won the Magsaysay.
‘In fact, if we look at the matter statistically, sir, poor Indians in the agricultural industry are least likely, I repeat least likely, to kill themselves than richer Indians or even South Koreans in general or Australian farmers in particular.’
what explains the fact that the number of male farmers who commit suicide is many times higher than female farmers, who are the most oppressed creatures on earth?
‘There is a concern that you have created the myth of farmer suicide to milk it for your activism like other fucker-doodle-do-gooders.’
Hopefully, Damodarbhai would make a distinction between dubious trust funds of deceased capitalists, like the Ford Foundation, and the responsible philanthropy of live capitalists.
A patriarch and a modern young woman are natural foes, yet Miss Iyer and he see something in the goodness syndicate that most people cannot. They can see a feudal system where the strong use the weak to attack the stronger.
‘For my people,’ Sharmila says. ‘That’s what the activists around you have trained you to say. They have employed you, Sharmila, as a saint with a tube up her nose. Sainthood is a form of employment, you know that, right?’ ‘Are you really a journalist?’ ‘You’re in love. There is a man who loves you, Sharmila. You keep all his letters in a box and you read them. You want to live like a person, not a saint.’ ‘I think you must leave.’
lose. In any other line of work, they would be sacked and replaced by more effective people, but in the battle against villains, the union of dud heroes has ensured for itself an indestructible job security.
Over the decade since the murder of Laila, Damodarbhai has been rising, and he has risen to the level of a minor god. He cannot be destroyed until people fall out of love with him, tire of him, hate him. And one day when they abandon him and he begins to decay, and his rivals in the Sangh come to give him one final blow, only then will he lose the power to guard the Beards. To go to war with him when he is at his peak is to go to war against a sacred hologram beamed by the people.
MUKUNDAN WILL WAIT another five years. Then another five, if he has to. But a day will come when Damodarbhai will lose an election. And Mukundan will go to slay the Beards. He imagines the faces of the Beards when they figure out that they have been done, and a funny thought occurs to him.
During his stint as editor of Open, the news weekly, he broke the ‘Radia Tapes’ story, which revealed the telephone conversations between a corporate lobbyist and some of India’s most influential public figures.
