As a writer, I have to go to a different place now. As a person... I want to step off whatever this stage is that I have been given. The argument has been made, the battle remains to be fought - and that requires a different set of skills.
We're Prisoners of War, Chacko said. Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter.
When you recreate the image of man, why repeat God's mistakes?
The strange thing about Roman soldiers in the comics, according to Rahel, was the amount of trouble they took over their armour and their helmets, and then, after all that, they left their legs bare. It didn't make any sense at all. Weatherwise or otherwise.
For one struck down by Cupid's bow Life becomes burdensome, isn't that so?
She remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept growing. Like starlight, travelling through the universe long after the stars themselves had died. Like cities. Fizzy, effervescent, simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them.
No matter how elaborate its charade, she recognized loneliness when she saw it.
To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being absent from it, from being written out of it altogether. A chuckle, after all, could become a foothold in the sheer wall of the future.
If you ask me what is at the core of what I write, it isn't about 'rights', it's about justice. Justice is a grand, beautiful, revolutionary idea.
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.
The fact that something so fragile, so unbearably tender had survived, had been allowed to exist, was a miracle.
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.
For many people, the family is portrayed as the settled place of reasonable safety, but as anyone who has read 'The God of Small Things' would know, for me it was a dangerous place. I felt humiliated in that space. I wanted to get away as soon as I could.
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.
But can we, should we, let apprehensions about the future immobilize us in the present?
Jis sar ko ghurur aaj hai yaan taj-vari ka Kal uss pe yahin shor hai phir nauhagari ka The head which today proudly flaunts a crown Will tomorrow, right here, in lamentation drown.
When we speak of confronting Empire, we need to identify what Empire means. Does it mean the US government (and its European satellites), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and multinational corporations? Or is it something more than that?
Her grief grieved her. His devastated her.
To call someone like me a writer-activist suggests that it's not the job of a writer to write about the society in which they live. But it used to be our job.
Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds & then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.
Years of imprisoning and beheading writers never succeeded in shutting them out. However, placing them in the heart of a market and rewarding them with a lot of commercial success, has.
She knew he'd be back. No matter how elaborate its charade, she recognized loneliness when she saw it. She sensed that in some strange tangential way, he needed her shade as much as she needed his. And she had learned from experience that Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.
It was herself she was exhausted by. She had lost the ability to keep her discrete worlds discrete—a skill that many consider to be the cornerstone of sanity. The traffic inside her head seemed to have stopped believing in traffic lights. The result was incessant noise, a few bad crashes and eventually gridlock.
Do you realize what you have just done? D'you know what happens when you hurt people? When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
Democracy has become Empire's euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism.
Why should propaganda be the exclusive preserve of the Western media? Just because they do it better?
He held her as though she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious.
Crashing through the world like a falling stone. It is his color and his light. It is the vessel into which he pours.
At the time I was being celebrated for having made ‘India' (whatever that means) proud. It was an odd place to be in, because I wasn't feeling at all proud of India or what was going on here.
For the first time in her life, Tilo felt that her body had enough room to accomodate all of its organs.
The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains.
I have truly known what it means for a writer to feel loved.
Some things come with their own punishments.
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 Marxists worked from within the communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to. They offered a cocktail revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism and orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy.
For the South African White minority, neo-liberalism is apartheid with a clean conscience, called Democracy.
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.
Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.
Rahel knew that this had happened because she had been hoping that it wouldn't. She hadn't learned to control her Hopes yet.
The practice of untouchability, cruel as it was- the broom tied to the waist, the pot hung around the neck- was the performative, ritualistic end of the practice of caste. The real violence of the caste was the denial of entitlement: to land, to wealth, to knowledge, to equal opportunity.
She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.
Excitement Always Leads to Tears.
It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, ploughing it up like gun-fire.
Rahel's toy wristwatch had the time painted on it. Ten to two. One of her ambitions was to own a watch on which she could change the time whenever she wanted to (which according to her was what Time was meant for in the first place).
Certainly no beast has essayed the boundless, infinitely inventive art of human hatred. No beast can match its range and power.
I think many people were surprised by the victory of the Congress, because it was really hard to see beyond the sort of haze of hatred that the Hindu nationalists had been spreading.
In Orissa, where it is mining bauxite, Vedanta is financing a university. In these creeping, innocuous ways mining corporations enter our imaginations: the Gentle Giants Who Really Care. It's called CSR, corporate social responsibility.
Humans are animals of habit.
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.
