In 1997, Arundhati Roy won Booker prize for her first novel "The God Of Small Things."
In 2004, she was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize.
More I learn of her, more I see the signs of an Indian version of Ayn Rand in making! Ayn Rand slashed the communist dictatorship of Russia. Arundhati Roy lashes out the capitalistic dictatorship of America.
Significantly, both women have the same initials!
Below is given the gist of her ever famous documentary: "We" (http://www.weroy.org/)
Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. Fiction dances out of you and the non-fiction is wrenched out by the broken aching road I wake up to, every morning. My writing is not about nations or histories. It’s about the paranoia and ruthlessness of power. About the physics of power that foresees the genocide when too much power is concentrated at the hands of a nation, a corporation or an individual.
Anti Americanism is into the process of being consented into an ideology. But to call some one an anti-American or for that matter, anti -Indian or anti-Timbaktooan is not just racist. It’s a failure of imagination. An inability to see the world in terms, other than those the establishments have set out for you. I’m taken aback by the fact that how many people think that opposing the war in Afghanistan amounts to supporting terrorism or voting for Taliban. If you can be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you can be told what to say or think.
Each person who has lost his loved ones surely knows deeply that no war, no active revenge, no bombs dropped on loved ones of others can blunt the edges of their pain. A war can’t avenge for those who have died. War is only a brute of desecration of their memories.
Yet another war, this time on Iraq, by scenically manipulating people’s grief by packaging it for TV serials sponsored by corporations selling detergents and shoes is to cheapen and devalue the grief. This is a vulgar dismay of the business of grief. The commerce of grief. The pillaging of most private human feelings for political purpose. It’s not clever enough a subject to speak of from public platform. But what I want you to see is a loss, grief, failure, brokenness, numbness, uncertainty, fear, the death of feeling, the death of dreaming and the absolutely relentless, endless, habitual unfairness of the world.
On September 1973 in Chile, General Pinochet overthrew a democratically elected government into CIA backed crew. Thousands and many more were killed in public executions, torture chambers and concentration camps. The dead were buried in mine shafts and unmarked graves. “In United States, we are sympathetic to what you are doing in Chile. We wish your government well” US conveyed, knowing the involvement of CIA in massacre. For 17 years, people lived in the dread of sudden knock on the door in midnight. Those of us who’d known a life in democracy can hardly imagine what an absolute loss of freedom in dictatorship means. It’s not only those who General Pinochet murdered but also the lives he stole from the living must be accounted for.
Winston Churchill said of the Palestinians: “I do not agree that a dog in a palace has a final right to the palace even he may have remained there for very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit there is a great wrong done to Palestinians by the fact that a stronger, higher grade, worldly wise race has come and taken their place.” Palestine ceased to exist except in the minds and hearts of its natives, who became refugees. It is still considered illegally occupied. People never know when their homes will be demolished, when their children will be shot, when they’ll be allowed to go the market to buy medicine and food.
Donald Rumsfield said that his mission in the war against the terrorism is to persuade the world that Americans must be allowed to continue their way of life. When the maddened king stamps his foot, slaves tremble in their quarters. So standing here to death, it’s hard for me to say this that the American way of life is simply not sustainable. Because it doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America.
Fortunately, power has a shelf life. When the time comes, may be this mighty empire will, like others before, overreach itself and implode from within. It looks as though the structural cracks have already appeared. As the war on terror casts its net wider and wider, America’s corporate heart is hemorrhaging. Given all this endless, empty chatter of officials about democracy, freedom of speech and transparency, today the world is run by the three most secretive institutions in the word:
1) The International Monitory Fund (IMF)
2) The World Bank
3) The World Trade Organization (WTO)All three in turn are dominated by US. The decisions are made in secret. The people who head them are appointed behind the closed doors. Nobody really knows anything about them; their politics, their beliefs, their intentions. Nobody said they can make decisions on our behalf. A world run by a handful of greedy bankers and CEOs who nobody elected. Soviet style communism (Russia) failed not because it was intrinsically evil, but because it was flawed. It allowed too few people to use up too much power. American capitalism will fail for the same reason. Both are edifices constructed by human intelligence, undone by human nature. Perhaps the things will become worse and then better.
-Arundhati Roy in “We”, the documentary.
