The people who created the crisis will not be the ones that come up with a solution.
It was a time when the unthinkable became the thinkable and the impossible really happened.
It is true that success is the most boring thing, it is tinny and brittle, failure runs deeper. Success is dangerous. I have a very complicated relationship with that word.
Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn’t matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way.
Many people have accused me of having a romantic view, whereas I personally I feel sorry for those who have lost romance in their lives.
Literature is the opposite of a nuclear bomb.
It is such a supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they’re used.
The NGO-ization of politics threatens to turn resistance into a well-mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks thrown in. Real resistance has real consequences. And no salary.
But can we, should we, let apprehensions about the future immobilize us in the present?
We need a new kind of politics. Not the politics of governance, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics of joining hands across the world and preventing certain destruction.
The Congress has historically played covert communal politics in order to create what in India we call vote banks where you pit one community against another and so on in order to secure votes.
Is globalization about ‘the eradication of world poverty,’ or is it a mutant variety of colonialism, remote controlled and digitally operated?
Acceptance spells death to a writer.
You begin to realize that hypocrisy is not a terrible thing when you see what overt fascism is compared to sort of covert, you know, communal politics which the Congress has never been shy of indulging in.
The world’s ‘freeest’ country has the highest number in prison.
Let’s leave one alive so that it can be lonely.
Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience?
Poverty is a crime and the poor are terrorists.
The UID is a corporate scam which funnels billions of dollars into the IT sector.
Nilekani’s technocratic obsession with gathering data is consistent with that of Bill Gates, as though lack of information is what is causing world hunger.