The magazine Guernica recently posted an interview with the great Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy.
What is it about Roy that so irks the Indian middle-class and elite? Is it the fact that she has no truck with the sober, scholarly, Brahmanical discourse of the respectable middle-of-the-road protectors of the status-quo?A bit melodramatically, I asked, “Are you lonely?”
“If I were lonely, I’d be doing something else. But I’m not. I deploy my writing from the heart of the crowd.”
My first piece of writing was when I was five… I still have those notebooks. Miss Mitten, a terrifying Australian missionary, was my teacher. She would tell me on a daily basis that she could see Satan in my eyes.
I could hardly believe what I was reading. The Supreme Court judgment that said that though it didn’t have proof that Afzal was a member of a terrorist group, and the evidence against him was only circumstantial, it was sentencing him to death to “satisfy the collective conscience of society.”
A good selection of writing by Arundhati Roy is visible online at http://www.chitram.org/mallu/a…