On average, every second page of this book makes me want to erupt with fury at how good it is. So, that’s a positive thing, right. And in-between those every-second-pages-on-average there are still a myriad of other miracles being worked into the literary cloth.

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

(Published in 1997, winner in the same year of the Booker Prize – yes, I am running behind).

Largely, it is a child’s/s’* world-view depicted, and done so with such veracity yet literary control that it’s a little hard, and more than pointless, to determine where authorly and childly wisdom take hold.

I can’t wait to finish it.  I imagine the author couldn’t wait to finish it. Though their efforts in creating a novel of such complex imagery (stunning motifs abound), emotions (there is child abuse), themes (I can’t specify them all briefly), and delicate weaves of narrative come across not as painstakingly constructed, but beautifully conjured.

Oh, and the language. The lyrical, vivid, deft, playful Language!

Fuck. If there are two Central Points to take away thus far, in terms of theme, they are summed up by the young boy Estha’s Two Thoughts:

“(a) Anything can happen to Anyone.

And

(b) It’s best to be prepared.“

And (c), as the novel as a whole would seem so far to suggest, for some things nothing can ever prepare you.

* The central character in terms of ’screen time’ is probably Rahel, but her two-egg non-identical twin Estha is, as stated, not Other, not separate from We or Us.

Abnaa al Gebelawi (Children of Gebelawi), By Ibrahim Farghali, Cairo: Al Ain, 2009

In Ibrahim Farghali’s Abnaa al Gebelawi, all of the texts of the great Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz suddenly vanish from the face of the earth. This happens without explanation, reason, or ostensible cause: wherever they might be found – not only in libraries and bookshops but also on bookshelves and bedside bedside tables – novels by Mahfouz in their original Arabic are simply nowhere to be found. The authorities’ attempt to remedy the situation in the face of worldwide and (notably, if somewhat incredibly) popular uproar are juxtaposed with sightings of Mahfouz’s characters in a variety of locales, seldom having anything to do with the settings in which they actually appear in Mahfouz’s books.

With six – now seven – books to his name, Farghali (b. 1967) is among the most prolific novelists of his generation. In his devotion to the genre and his formal conservatism, he is perhaps the worthiest heir to Mahfouz (1911-2006), the Nobel prize winner most known for his mid-century tales of Cairo. Unlike Mahfouz, however, Farghali is firmly steeped in a magical realist tradition. Running through much of his prose are echoes of Jose Saramago’s nightmarish humour or shades of Italo Calvino’s fascination with the fantastical nature of fiction. He is taken by twins, telepathy and teleporting, and his firmly middle-class characters – otherwise utterly ordinary – have been known to reappear after they have died.

In Abnaa al Gebelawi – Farghali’s latest and greatest work – we face the prospect of a world without literature. The myriad voices in the book — for the young narrator cum author assumes many guises throughout these pages — express concern as to the fraught future of Arabic literature, about the erosion of the liberal and humane values that Mahfouz and his work represent, and (reflecting perhaps the essential fear of all true writers) about oblivion at large.

The events of the book are staged around a relatively uncomplex love affair involving the narrator and the eccentric daughter of a well-to-do family— occasion for Farghali to probe the psychology of class and sex in contemporary Egyptian society. Further in, however, the story breaks up and morphs into countless alternative and subordinate plot-lines, until it becomes clear (although it is never stated) that the whole of Abnaa al Gebelawi is but the barely coherent waste of a single pluralistic mind – the mind of a young writer concerned with the literary wasteland around him. The allegorical dimension remains predominant, and in this way recalls Awlad Haretnah (Children of Our Alley, 1959), the title of whose earlier English translation Farghali translates back verbatim for his own.

As it happens, Awlad Haretnah was the only book by Mahfouz to suffer censure from the religious establishment. In it the history of a popular residential quarter in Cairo stands in for the sum total of humanity’s spiritual experience. That quarter’s oldest, strongest and most benevolent resident – for many generations hidden away in his mansion – is called Gebelawi. Gebelawi has envoys or representatives, descendants or grandchildren, whose struggles to spread peace and justice make up episodes of the saga. Each is a retelling of the life of one of the prophets of Islam, starting with Adam and ending with the False Messiah. Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad all feature, but at the end a rumour spreads that Gebelawi himself has died. In Arab literary circles it is frequently claimed that if not for Awlad Haretnah, Mahfouz would not have received the Nobel Prize. But it proved too much for orthodox, let alone radical Muslims, for whom Mahfouz would become the enemy soon enough.

a letter from Mahfouz to Mohammad al Badawi

Radical Islam had claimed many lives since the 1980s when in 1994 Mahfouz barely survived being knifed to death outside his house in Cairo. The irony was that, of all the helpless octogenarians his bearded young assailants could have targeted for apostasy, he was probably the least secular. A typical Cairene of the pre-bin ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Laden era, the man had led an all but exemplary (for which read profoundly unadventurous) life. He did not seek revolution, he did not take great risks. He had no utopian or transcendental illusions. And perhaps it was thanks to this and this alone that he was able to invent and reinvent the novel, the youngest genre in the language, defining it for generations of writers down to Farghali.

Applying every novelistic model at his disposal, Mahfouz produced a phenomenal number of readable books: social chronicles, political critiques, philosophical manuals. None was too difficult or experimental to render it inaccessible to even the most common reader. None sought to undermine whatever pillar of the status quo it came in contact with. Notwithstanding the elaborately veiled, painstakingly respectful Ages-of-Man narrative in Awlad Haretnah – a Muslim treatise on the meaning of life if ever there was one – in Mahfouz’s books, the family, the creed, the government are never attacked for what they are or what they stand for, but only for their most striking deviations, omissions or excesses.

For a magic realist like Farghali, Mahfouz may not be the most obvious point of departure; the Nobel laureate is, after all, best known for devotion to the real even in his least realistic works, and one would have trouble imagining him so much as hinting at the paranormal or the fantastical. Yet in Abnaa al Gebelawi, the grand opera to Farghali’s various arias, Mahfouz is an embodiment of something not so different from the sense of sight. His books stand in for almost everything Farghali values: Literature, Thought, Freedom, Knowledge, even Love. The premise could not have been more powerful.

The God of Small Things by acclaimed writer Arundhathi Roy could only be hailed as a masterpiece in the literary world for more reasons than just winning the Booker Prize in 1997. Set in the Kottayam town of Ayemenem in southern India, Roy lures the readers into the secret world of one very fractured family upon whom an unforeseen tragedy lurks about. The tragedy of crossing into forbidden territory and tampering with laws that laid out who should be loved and how. And how much.

Told mainly through the recollections of the fraternal twins, Rahel and Estha, the story unfolds in a devastatingly arresting pace. From the funeral of an innocent child (the twins’ cousin) to the death of an innocent man (the man the twins loved by the day and the man their mother loved by night), The God of Small Things captivates the readers in a state of dazzled shock as Roy unveils, with such melodramatic prose, how the dire consequences of crossing into forbidden territory has altered the lives of everyone in its path.

The heart-rending narrative goes as far as exploring the inner worlds of each character with minute detail, beautifully woven around the tragedies of life. The readers are easily drawn into a world of secrets, tragedy, love and madness and yet nothing prepares the readers for the calamity about to descend. Roy’s uncanny ability to draw reader’s attention to her flawless portrayal of senses, brings the story truly alive.

A magnificent debut novel with a marvelous prose sure to mesmerize readers in every possible way. The God of Small Things is truly a book to be savored, devoured and treasured. It should definitely be on your list-of-must-read-novels-before-you-die, if it already isn’t. Recommended with the highest praise!

Dating-Down:
“By this I don’t mean dating a guy who’s less successful—a woman could earn quadruple her guy’s income and as long as he treats her well, I’m all for it. But if you’ve ever said what Rachel said to me recently—’I just have to learn not to expect so much, emotionally’ —you are in danger. If you make excuses for him, like ‘I wouldn’t want a guy who’s too romantic’, then you’re dating down too.”

————————————————————————————————————————-

Met with a friend today and realized how infectious passionate people are. He just came back from Ghana, now interns at City Hall and works part-time for the World Wild Life Fund. On top of that he’s dealing with a 15 million dollar budget working for the student union and keeping up with world events. The boy is definitely on his way to law school –this, I know. His interest in human-rights is contagious.

We talked Noam Chomsky, books, capitalism, Marxism, Barack Obama, media, IMF, travels… Into the BMV where he picked up The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and I picked up The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein… Developing the Philippines, identity crisis, his new long-distance University of Victoria second-year law-student girlfriend… dot dot dot…NO BIG DEAL!

I am happy for this friend of mine. His tales of Ghana and of the miracles which occurred there led to a conversation about discovering ourselves… And today I’ve discovered such: NO, I could never have such heavy, socio-economic-based conversations on a daily basis. But
YES, I am sometimes passionate about these things…

YES, people date-down for one reason or another, and YES they’re all around me… But NO (like my friend Michael who has stayed so committed to his standards and so unabashedly true to being himself) I don’t think I could ever do it. As I’m sure he would agree, being ‘unabashedly true to myself’ in the end, is so worth it.

————————————————————————————————————————-

“Here’s what I’ve got to say: Relationships aren’t supposed to suck. You deserve to be loved, to be paid attention to, to gaze across the room, see your boyfriend and think, ‘God, am I lucky to be with that guy’, and know he’s thinking the same about you.

As I write this, I realize that I myself have been the loser boyfriend. When I was dating a woman I’ll call Alison a few years ago, I still had some growing up to do. One night she was trying to talk about how our relationship might be more satisfying for both of us if we communicated better. And I actually asked her, ‘Can we talk about this during the commercials? 24’s on now.’ I wanted the sex and the companionship that came with having a girlfriend—but not the work. I wish now that Alison had told me to go home and watch my own TV, but instead she sighed and said, ‘OK.’ While my behavior was never her fault, she might have been surprised at what a good kick in the ass would have done for me. Luckily the next few women I dated gave me just that, and I shaped up considerably. That’s why I say this to my future girlfriend, whoever she may be: If you want me to be an excellent boyfriend, accept nothing less.”

Andres Barrioquinto The Gods of Small Things at the Blanc Gallery in Makati. All photos courtesy of Blanc Gallery

In Andres Barrioquinto’s latest one-man show at Blanc Gallery (Shaw Blvd., Mandaluyong  City, Philippines), The God of Small Things (17 October to November 7), portraiture merges with emblematic Japanese print motifs, the aesthetic blends with emotional states, and the surface is but an alluring mask that conceals a core of horror.

This is art in extremis, seductive and yet well-within the province and territory of nihilistic traditions.

Barrioquinto is dubbed by Philippine art critics as a “master of the dark and mysterious.” When I saw Barrioquinto’s “A Dreaded Sunny Day” at West Gallery (Quezon City)  in 2002, I was mesmerised by the subtle, masterful orchestration of despairing, decaying figures. Here, I said is a strong-minded artist whose unapologetic figurative style is similar to the equivalent of witnessing a silk kimono-clad samurai committing the act of disembowelment right before your eyes. Magnificent viscera.

And yet the questions Barrioquinto brings to the fore somehow remains there, exposed, unanswered and remaining in an endless loop of despair. The classic figure 8 of dolor; a state of suffering, eternal condemnation in the Christian tradition.

Crane's Hatred, Andres Barrioquinto, Oil in canvas, 60x60 inches

Calling his latest show “The Gods of Small Things” references the Booker Prize-winning 1997 novel of Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things,” a tragic melodrama of love doomed from the very beginning by India’s inhumane caste system. Whatever motives Barrioquinto might have in referencing (or coincidentally recalling) Roy’s doomed tale, I can’t think of a more fitting literary cousin that touches on the futility of human will when pitted against bigger and darker forces.

Twilight Madman, Andres Barrioquinto, Oil on Canvas, 30x24 inches

Here is the crux of Barrioquinto’s art. Though he has somehow strayed, in recent years, into the more aesthetically appealing elements of his art, the (hard)core remains. To illustrate, the work titled “Twilight Madman” is a sinister portrait that captures the emotional zeitgeist of our times. A work framed with cool shades of blues, soft sweet pinks and the earthy, warmer brownish hues of vegetating/creeping flora. Dead centre is the piercing, cold stare of the Madman that confronts you, the viewer; unblinking and feral. Count on Barrioquinto, he delivers the goods.

In “Crane’s Hatred,” the human face is seemingly gashed with black barbwires, which in closer inspection are the negatives of flying cranes, a symbol of migration and seasonal change in Japanese lore. The view of the face (and averted eyes) is from a low angle, a perspective that prompts issues of spatial dominance, distance and control. Another repulsive state, a core of darkness.

Blissful Void, Andres Barrioquinto, Oil on canvas, 60x40 inches

Blissful Void is the lone ranger in the series, the artist taking a pause from the rigidity of the other portraits; a warm choco-coffee break with Barrioquinto, as if he has finally decided to drop his brush to snugly sit beside you for a meditation on warmth, furry familiarity, assurance and the anticipation of spring.

It is the oddity of small things where Barrioquinto superbly excels, and by that I mean the small things that we, the viewers, usually take for granted.

“Sometimes a dent could even emphasize the beauty of something,” Barrioquinto said in the gallery’s exhibit notes.

It is precisely his deep, unrelenting focus on the dent, seen and unseen, that Barrioquinto wins my full 10 votes. Catch this show when you can!

Stand up for your right to read!

The new Banned Book Club’s first selection is The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Ms. Roy faced an obscenity trial in her native India for this, her first novel. She also won the prestigious Man Booker Prize for Fiction. To learn more about the book and the controversy surrounding it, see her Salon.com interview. You may also be interested in this study guide, which includes themes, criticism, quotes, and more about this book.

The God of Small Things is available for checkout here in the Brown Library (call number PR9499.3.R59 G63 1997), as well as at your local public libraries. Google Books also has most, but not all, chapters available for reading online here.

The Banned Book Club will meet next Wednesday, October 21st, at 6pm in the library study room, top floor of Brown. We’ll also be picking the next book selection, so bring suggestions! Check out the American Library Association’s top ten lists of most frequently challenged books of the 21st century.

Send questions and suggestions to Amanda Hall at afh25@email.vccs.edu or Kalyca Schultz at kschultz@virginiawestern.edu. The club is open to faculty, staff, students, and members of the community.

If you’re on Facebook, RSVP for this event here.

G Sampath Sunday, October 11, 2009

Even Bollywood has turned its back on the poor, says Arundhati Roy, the Booker prize-winning novelist who, over the years has become the most caustic critic of her own class, and of her country’s policies.
In the process, while winning new fans, she’s also alienated many who were drawn to her by her fiction. In an exclusive interview with G Sampath, Roy explains how her politics, as much as her fiction, defines who she is as a person

How would you categorise your politics?

I find it unnecessary for me to classify what my politics are. It’s really time to break out of thinking in so many of the ways in which we have thought. You stop thinking country-wise, then, you stop thinking Left and Right, because now the greatest capitalist nation in the world is Communist China, so all these things get overturned in some way or the other.
I think, now, with what’s happening ecologically, we need a different view. But one thing I do want to say is that, for all the things that are wrong here, the real worry is that there are so many things that are right, which are being dismantled and destroyed. For example, we still have people here who know the secrets of how to live lightly on this planet; people who know that when you challenge a consumerist society, it’s not as if you have to live with less happiness and less satisfaction; people who know that there is the possibility of ecstasy — all this is lost in other countries. It’s here still, and this is what makes one extreme, you know. You’re fighting to protect something, and that is fundamental to what I am– I think, when you fight to protect something, your anger is huge, because you just see this juggernaut of destruction destroying what ought to be at least the seeds of a future way of thinking, and we still have it.

The Financial Times review of your latest book, Listening To Grasshoppers, says, “The danger is that her extreme views… will alienate those whose support will be essential in India’s struggle for social justice in the years ahead.” This is a frequent charged leveled against you even by people who broadly, shall we say, empathise with your critiques. Many say that you “overdo it” and by being needlessly polemical, you harm the very cause that you are supposedly supporting.
When you are engaged in a critique on some very-close-to-the-bone issues, not everyone is going to stand up and applaud, and say, waah, beta, kitna achcha kaam kiya. The people who hold these opinions you mention have a voice, and also belong to a particular class. But millions of people who don’t have a voice, and whose opinions are not polled in these publications, believe just the opposite.
Supposing I was trying to please this lot, I would alienate the others. It’s not as if you can fight these battles and still have everybody on your side. Of course, some people are going to be alienated. Of course, some people are going to have opinions about how I write or don’t write. I can’t please everyone. I don’t have a problem with some people feeling hostile, some people feeling that I should have taken a ’softly-softly’ approach, but that’s not me. To me, in fact, what finally gets written is after toning down even greater anger. If you go to a place like Dantewada now, even I feel like a moderate. So I am not really polling for popularity. But as a writer, I know who reads my work, and who it alienates.
I have spoken at places where 30,000 people have gathered, so I know what I am doing, and I am okay with the criticism also, because, well, The Financial Times and The Economist — these are the heart of what most people see as ‘the other side’. So there is going to be a conflict. I am not at all saying that I am somebody who makes no mistakes, but I just want to say that I know what I am saying, and I know how I am saying it,and I think about it, and I still do it.

Given the nature of your politics, how come you haven’t dissociated yourself from your big, MNC publisher and shifted to a smaller, perhaps not-for-profit publisher?

Well, I could also write these essays and stand outside the station and distribute photocopies. It’s very complicated. This system doesn’t leave you the option of being pristine. If you write a book, even if it’s a book on political stuff, you get royalties, you put it in the bank; even if you don’t do it, the bank invests the money in the stock market, so none of us can be pure, really. And if you are, then you have to live in your own purity and outside of engaging. In that pursuit of pristineness, you end up being ineffective in some way. I have to live with certain contradictions, as do all of us.

In your book, you speak of an ‘organic relationship’ between genocide and progress. Can there be an idea of progress that does not entail some form of violence?

Today, the idea of progress has come to mean just the western idea of progress and development, and a totally industrialised society. Of course, now with climate change, we have no choice but to imagine a different kind of progress, where perhaps everybody has less but your footprint on the earth is lighter. We have to go back to a totally different way of looking at consumption. Right now, the situation is that, unless you consume, the economy will collapse; but if you consume, the ecology will collapse — if you consume at the current rate. So in a way this is a good time for radical thought, but one doesn’t know if human beings are capable of it as a race, because we have historically seen societies collapse doing things that they know will cause them to collapse.

After the collapse of the Soviet experiment, socialism is today considered a discredited ideology. There seems to be a consensus now that there is no alternative to capitalism.

Capitalism has also equally discredited itself. If you look at the violence that it has unleashed. So both the ideologies have discredited themselves. One, because of a concentration of power — in the socialist countries we saw the concentration of power in the hands of a very few, who then misused it. And in capitalism, the concentration of power [as wealth] has become kind of malignant now. If you see how wealth is being concentrated, we can’t even think of it in terms of countries anymore. You have to think of the coalition of the world’s elite. Apart from the race for minerals like bauxite, etc, there is today a race for land. In places like Pakistan this had already started long ago. In India, we have our own corporate elite who’ll corner the land and start corporate agriculture. You corner the food, you corner the water, and you are back to the old colonial system of unleashing huge wars, which is what’s going to happen. Because you can’t take away the resources of so many millions of people, including water, and not expect there to erupt a war that, maybe you’ll try and contain with your army and the police, which is what India is heading towards.Beyond a certain point, given the number of people, what alternative do they have?
If the corporates have no alternative to capitalism, people also have no alternative to thirst, or to hunger. That’s why you’re seeing this increasing unrest. If it’s not addressed, then it will have to be addressed at some stage. But it will be more difficult to address once there’s a breakdown of the system, which is what we are seeing in Chhattisgarh and Orissa.
I think that it is possible to reverse this process — it’s not even a process — it’s an imagination, to re-imagine something. But at the heart of it will have to lie the idea of justice, and when I say justice, I am not talking about a utopian society in which everybody is equal because we know that it’s a utopia, but you have to indicate that you’re willing to move in that direction. But right now we’re moving in the opposite direction.

Historically, the middle classes have often been at the vanguard of progressive change in society — as in the freedom movement, for example. Are today’s middle classes performing that role?

The role of the middle-class in the freedom movement is a very complicated subject. The middle classes and the industrialists had a lot to gain themselves by stepping into the shoes of the British. But I also don’t subscribe to those who say that it was nothing – I think getting independence from the British was an important stage, but it stopped there, and then it began immediately to move in the other direction — immediately — starting with Kashmir. And the process began of excluding huge numbers of people.
Today, if the middle class could see its way through the noise of propaganda and information that’s been pushed at it, maybe some people will become a vanguard of change that leads to a kind of healing and sustainability. But now, I have to say that in India, particularly, there is kind of rot in the air. Because so many people have just moved into the middle class, it’s new for them, and so it’s very difficult to also expect them to question things — after all, they just got there. But unfortunately, it’s a bad time for them to have just got there. And unless there is a kind of vision and an urgency that sets in, we are heading towards trouble. Because every institution in the country is excluding the poor.

Can you give an example?
Since I am in Bombay, it’s fascinating, if you look at somebody like Amitabh Bachchan. How did he gain the place that he has in the hearts of the people? In many of his early films, he was the poor guy who grew up in the slums. He was like, mein sadak ka kutta hoon, and look at a film like Coolie — he was a Muslim, a coolie, and a trade union leader. There’s a battle against a corrupt minister where the minister holds a trishul and he has a hammer and sickle. And from there, to now, where in the movies, he only lives in villas and is getting out of helicopters, and those movies are only shown in these little cinema halls — multiplexes. Even Bollywood has completely walked away from the poor of this country. The cinema halls have changed and the cinema has changed to accommodate the cinema halls, or the cinema halls have changed to accommodate the cinema, I don’t know. But Amitabh is still adored because of the bank deposits that he made back then. And to me, there’s a terrible poignant tragedy in that.

The arrest of Maoist leader Khobad Ghandy — and before that, the arrest and release of Binayak Sen — has sparked off a renewed debate on the use of violence as a tool of struggle for justice, with many taking the stand that it is not permissible in a democracy. What is your position on this?
The Narmada Movement, the most spectacular non-violent movement of independent India, has been almost completely sidelined, ridiculed, humiliated. Travelling in the Narmada Valley where there’s been a nonviolent movement, or travelling in the Kashmir Valley where there’s been a violent movement, the point is that, every kind of dissent, whether it is violent or nonviolent, democratic or non-democratic, is crushed. So this is the situation that’s been created. You look at what happened in Lalgarh. They’ve arrested Chatrodhar Mahato. He is the leader of what is distinctly not a Maoist movement, but he is being called a Maoist. When I was travelling in Orissa — this was a few years ago — when the mining had just begun, there were no Maoists there. I spoke to many, many people there and they were all very wary of the Maoists, because they knew that if the Maoists come, there’ll be repression. But in every newspaper, they were going on saying ‘Maoists-Maoists’ because, they need to paint everybody as a Maoist in order for the repression to take place.
This debate about violence and nonviolence is an old one. But I think that debate cannot be an absolute one, based on absolute principles, as it becomes another debate over pristineness. Because even in India, if you take the example of our nonviolent movement for independence, you have to look at the context in which it happened. Britain was totally weakened by the war, it couldn’t sustain its control here and it had to leave. But do you think the Jews could have done [non-violent] Satyagraha in Nazi Germany?The Armenians could have done it in Turkey? Do you think the Palestinians could do it now? It’s complicated, and you’ll have to look at the context. I don’t think that whatever the adivasis in Chhattisgarh do, given the amount of bauxite and iron ore and the amount of profits, and the amount of zeroes that are coming out of that number… The violence of the assault by the state increases depending on how much profit there is to be made. This is the problem.

Is India in danger of becoming a police state?

What do you mean, “of becoming”? What do you think it is in Orissa and Chhatisgarh and Kashmir and Nagaland and Manipur and Lalgarh? Maybe it’s not a police state in Bombay though I am sure the surveillance is big time. You know, this Unique Identity Card, even the Conservative Party in English trashed it. Here everybody is saying it’s a great thing. You can’t give people water, you can’t give people schools, you can’t give people healthcare, but you can give them a unique identity card, and if they don’t have it, they don’t exist. So what are those 300,000 people hiding in the forests of Chhattisgarh now going to do? If they come out and get it, their land is gone; if they don’t get it, they don’t exist, and so they can be finished off, and it won’t be on the record.

You are known for your anti-statist views. But many activists, for example in education and healthcare, are working for change from within whatever spaces are available within the democratic framework. Do you believe that the state can serve as an agent of positive change?
I am somebody who talks about the bio-diversity of resistance, so I don’t want to say that working through the state is a ridiculous enterprise. Take NREGA. The same state that’s devastating and destroying and dispossessing people has come up with this Act. A lot of activists spend all their time trying to make sure that this little amount of money — 8,000 rupees a year or so — goes to who it’s meant to go to, and you cannot say that even that should not happen. And yet you know that it’s a way of keeping people busy, just about keeping them alive, and it was passed in order to mitigate a systematic dispossession. So, both things are important. The NREGA is the lifeline for so many people. But you can’t say that the NREGA is the solution to the problem; it’s just throwing some crumbs to the creatures under the table, while the feast goes on.

What are you reading just now?

I’ve just read this extraordinary book on the mill workers of Bombay, One Hundred Years, One hundred Voices by Meena Menon and Neera Adarkar.

Do you follow a fixed writing regimen?

When I write fiction, I have a very regimented schedule. As unregimented as the fiction is, the schedule is regimented. Right now, I’ve been trying to write this book of fiction, but I’ve been extremely worried about what’s happening in the forests, the troop movement, and the growing assault on the poorest people of this country, Operation Greenhunt. I don’t know why, first they called it Red Hunt, now they are calling it Green Hunt. When I am managing to write fiction, it’s regimented, but otherwise, when I’m traveling, I write however and whenever and wherever I can.

How far are you from finishing your second novel?

Very far.

Courtesy: Daily News Analysis (DNA)