tagged w/ Arundhati Roy
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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.Sitting in a car parked at a gas station on the outskirts of Houston, Texas, my... more
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We speak with acclaimed Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy on President Obama, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, India and Kashmir and much more. Roy also talks about her journey deep into the forests of central India to report on the Maoist insurgency.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-Vhs8ulNZQ&feature=relatedWe speak with acclaimed Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy on President Obama,... more
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As the authorities contemplate filing a criminal case against them, a senior Union minister today slammed Hurriyat hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani and writer Arundhati Roy for stating that Kashmir is not an integral part of India while the BJP demanded that the two be arrested on sedition charges. http://www.indiareport.com/India-usa-uk-news/latest-news/924082/National/1/20/1As the authorities contemplate filing a criminal case against them, a senior Union... more
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Last week Pew was crtitisized for their report that Americans diminishing believe in global warming:
Today they are telling us that bloggers are blogging at record rates about climate change. Much to my shegrin they were not referencing Blog Action Day.
The Skeptics of global warming dominated the conversation in both weeks, most recently reacting to a warning from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown about catastrophic danger if a climate change agreement is not reached by December's UN Summit. Many bloggers who criticized Brown's remarks pointed to the same article that spurred the previous week's discussion-an October 9 BBC report that questioned the science of global warming.
Global Warming Again
For the second week in a row, skeptics of global warming overwhelmed the online conversation about the subject while those who believe the problem is real remained relatively silent. This time they were reacting to warnings from British leader Gordon Brown about the urgent need for the international community to take action.
"We better watch out, if we listen to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown (renowned climate expert) when he warned of ‘floods, droughts and killer heatwaves if world leaders fail to agree a deal on climate change,'" noted Climate Change - The Facts sarcastically. "We all better listen to Chicken Little-The sky is falling."
"So I guess after the 50 days pass we'll be done hearing from these kooks," wrote Say Anything Blog. "Of course I doubt that. Even if they were to be consistent, something that would never happen, they'd come up with another catastrophe that could only be saved by giving up our freedom to be great."
"Uh oh. Another complete idiot opens his mouth," added Tiz at Politics 555. "Yep...in one staggering Philistine quote, Gordon Brown has joined the ranks of Al Gore, Prince Charles, and John Kerry. Trust me, that takes some doing."
The focus on questioning climate stats and the denial of the facts about the increasingly poluted planet and diminshng of water resources continues to...impress me. It reminded me of a line that I recently read from Arundhati Roy's new book, Field Notes On Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, where she stated:
"As a fiction writer, I have often wondered whether the attempt to always be precise, to try and get it all factually right somehow reduces the epic scale of what is really going on."
Related Posts:
The event that just might change the world (video)
What makes me listen? Sometimes it's the poetry (video)
Coo coo fro climate change: people doing crazy things to get your attention in the name of the planet
Last week Pew was crtitisized for their report that Americans diminishing believe in... more
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2 years ago
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World-renowned author and global justice activist Arundhati Roy discusses U.S. wars, the occupation in Kashmir, and her time spent with Maoist rebels in India.
March 23, 2010 |
ANJALI KAMAT: Earlier this month, when Forbes published its annual list of the world’s billionaires, the Indian press reported with some delight that two of their countrymen had made it to the coveted list of the ten richest individuals in the world.
Meanwhile, thousands of Indian paramilitary troops and police are fighting a war against some of its poorest inhabitants living deep in the country's so-called tribal belt. Indian officials say more than a third of the country, mostly mineral-rich forest land, is partially or completely under the control of Maoist rebels, also known as Naxalites. India’s prime minister has called the Maoists the country's "gravest internal security threat." According to official figures, nearly 6,000 people have died in the past seven years of fighting, more than half of them civilians. The government’s new paramilitary offensive against the Maoists has been dubbed Operation Green Hunt.
Well, earlier this month, the leader of the Maoist insurgency, Koteswar Rao, or Kishenji, invited the Booker Prize-winning novelist Arundhati Roy to mediate in peace talks with the government. Soon after, India’s Home Secretary, G.K. Pillai, criticized Roy and others who have publicly called state violence against Maoists, quote, "genocidal."
G.K. PILLAI: If the Maoists are murderers, please call the Maoists murderers. Why is it that if Maoists murders in West Midnapore last year from June to December 159 innocent civilians, I don't see any criticism of that? I can call it -- 159, if government have done it, a lot of people would have gone and said it's genocide. Why is that not genocide by the Maoists?
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Arundhati Roy recently had a rare journalistic encounter with the armed guerrillas in the forests of central India. She spent a few weeks traveling with the insurgency deep in India's Maoist heartland and wrote about their struggle in a 20,000-word essay published this weekend in the Indian magazine Outlook. It's called "Walking with the Comrades."
We're joined now here in New York by the world-renowned author and global justice activist. She won the Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize in 2002 and is the author of a number of books, including the Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things. Her latest collection of essays, published by Haymarket, is Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers.
Arundhati Roy, welcome to Democracy Now!
ARUNDHATI ROY: Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: Before we go into the very interesting journey you took, you arrive here on the seventh anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. You were extremely outspoken on the war and have continued to be. I remember seeing you at Riverside Church with the great Howard Zinn, giving a speech against the war. What are your thoughts now, seven years in? And how it's affected your continent, how it's affected India?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, I think the saddest thing is that when the American elections happened and you had all the rhetoric of, you know, change you can believe in, and even the most cynical of us watched Obama win the elections and did feel moved, watching how happy people were, especially people who had lived through the civil rights movement and so on, and, in fact what has happened is that he has come in and expanded the war. He won the Nobel Peace Prize and took an opportunity to justify the war. It was as though those tears of the black people who watched, you know, a black man come to power were now cut and paste into the eyes of the world’s elite watching him justify war.
And from where I come from, it's almost -- you know, you think that they probably don't even understand what they're doing, the American government. They don't understand what kind of ground they stand on. 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.
Iraq, the war is going on. Afghanistan, obviously, is rising up in revolt. It's spilled into Pakistan, and from Pakistan into Kashmir and into India. So we're seeing this superpower, in a way, caught in quicksand with a conceptual inability to understand what it's doing, how to get out or how to stay in. It's going to take this country down with it, for sure, you know, and I think it's a real pity that, in a way, at least George Bush was so almost obscene in his stupidity about it, whereas here it's smoke and mirrors, and people find it more difficult to decipher what's going on. But, in fact, the war has expanded.
More at the link:,World-renowned author and global justice activist Arundhati Roy discusses U.S. wars,... more
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Writer, activist, and author Arundhati Roy, in a recent essay on Tom Dispatch noted that, “The only way to contain -- it would be naïve to say end -- terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror. We're standing at a fork in the road. One sign says "Justice," the other "Civil War." There's no third sign and there's no going back. Choose.”
She was writing about the terror attacks in Mumbai and the immediate calls for revenge, the distorted parallels to 9/11, and the historical context that is so often missing from the countless editorials and expert opinions disseminated over the airwaves. As the United States moves to finalize $15 billion in aid to Pakistan to help the country fight terrorism the question of history and of context becomes increasingly important.Writer, activist, and author Arundhati Roy, in a recent essay on Tom Dispatch noted... more
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GRITtv
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3 years ago
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A great quote from the author/activist Arundhati Roy:
"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget."
A great quote from the author/activist Arundhati Roy:
"To love. To be loved.... more
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