Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy
Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian author who is best known for her novel The God of Small Things, which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997. This novel became the biggest-selling book by a nonexpatriate Indian author. She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth24 November 1961
CountryIndia
dispute farmers government suicide thousands wants
There have been tens of thousands of suicides by farmers in the country, and the government wants to dispute what a suicide is, who a farmer is.
cannot court given government master october plan remember six talking three
You would remember in October 2000 the court had given its judgement, it had told the government give me a rehabilitation master plan in three months...it is 2006 now, in six years it has still not even given a master plan and you are talking about rehabilitation. So, now in three months, how will rehabilitation happen? It cannot happen.
letting-go dream government
From being a dream, dams have become a very cynical corrupt enterprise; a way of letting governments lay their hands on huge sums of money; a way of centralizing resources; a way of snatching rivers away from the poor and giving them to the rich. And so in a sense they've become monuments to corruption.
mean government degrees
So far as we are concerned, there is not one word in the statements that I have made in this council which can be interpreted to mean that we will not honour international obligations. I want to say for the purpose of the record that there is nothing that has been said on behalf of the Government of India which in the slightest degree indicates that the Government of India or the Union of India will dishonour any international obligations it has undertaken.
government people democracy
Imagine what would happen if the government were to take the wealth of 200,000 of India's richest people and redistribute it amongst 2 million of India's poorest? We would hear a lot about socialist appropriation and the death of democracy. Why should taking from the rich be called appropriation and taking from the poor be called development?
war winning government
People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them. People get killed. Governments moult and regroup, hydra-headed. They use flags first to shrink-wrap people's minds and smother thought, and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury their willing dead.
government people hated
The American people ought to know that it is not them, but their government's policies, that are so hated.
government people mind
Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.
consumed electricity endless name poor produced rich
Electricity produced in the name of the poor is consumed by the rich with endless appetites,
america bombs dangerous nuclear policies
Why not have your nuclear bombs in your briefcase? All of these policies that America upholds, nuclear weapons, privatization, all of these things are going to mutate and metamorphosis into these dangerous things.
antagonism easy guess natural people power relationships
There are people who have comfortable relationships with power and people with natural antagonism to power. I think it's easy to guess where I am in that.
fought remains requires stage whatever
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.
against believe hold indian romantic
I have nothing against romance. I believe that we must hold on to the right to dream and to be romantic. But an Indian village is not something that I would romanticize that easily.
diet happening literature saddest
I think one of the saddest things that's happening to literature is that it's getting over-simplified by this diet of simple political ideas.