Once you understand the process of corporate globalization, you have to see that what happened in Argentina, the devastation of Argentina by the IMF, is part of the same machine that is destroying Iraq. Both are efforts to break open and to control markets. And so Argentina is destroyed by the chequebook, and Iraq is destroyed by the cruise missile. If the chequebook won’t work, the cruise missile will. Hell hath no fury like a market scorned.
Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is peace.
Rahel’s “list” was an attempt to order chaos. She revised it constantly, torn forever between love and duty. It was by no means a true gauge of her feelings.
In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.
He tells stories of the gods, but his yarn is spun from the ungodly, human heart.
While the Doctor was searching for a more lasting cure, the Saint journeyed across India distributing a placebo.
Like cities. Fizzy, effervescent, simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them.
Not everybody likes the idea of their cities filling up with the poor. A judge in Bombay called slum dwellers pickpockets of urban land. Another said, while ordering the bulldozing of unauthorized colonies, that people who couldn’t afford to live in cities shouldn’t live in them. When those who had been evicted went back to where they came from, they found their villages had disappeared under great dams and dusty quarries.
The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those a different imagination – an imagination that is outside of Capitalism as well as Communism. An imagination that has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment.
Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It.
When the last soldier has gone, the people climb over the debris of the burnt house. The tin sheets that were once the roof are still smouldering. A scorched trunk lies open, flames still leaping out of it. What was in it that burns so beautifully?
They’re mostly rich folk who live in our poor country like captive animals, incarcerated by their own wealth, locked and barred in their gilded cages, protecting themselves from the threat of the vulgar and unruly multitudes whom they have systematically dispossessed over the centuries.
I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens there’s lots to write about. That can’t be done in Kashmir. It’s not sophisticated, what happens here. There’s too much blood for good literature.
All we seem to be left with now is paranoid gibberish about a War on Terror whose whole purpose is to expand the War, increase the Terror, and obfuscate the fact that the wars of today are not aberrations but systemic, logical exercises to preserve a way of life whose delicate pleasures and exquisite comforts can only be delivered to the chosen few by a continuous, protracted war for hegemony – Lifestyle Wars.
She wondered what an unreleased soul, a soul-shaped stone on a funeral pyre, might look like. Like a starfish maybe. Or a millipede. Or a dappled moth with a living body and stone wings – poor moth – betrayed, held down by the very things that were meant to help it to fly.
The practice of untouchability, cruel as it was- the broom tied to the waist, the pot hung around the neck- was the performative, ritualistic end of the practice of caste. The real violence of the caste was the denial of entitlement: to land, to wealth, to knowledge, to equal opportunity.
Now we’re in a situation where democracy has been taken into the workshop and fixed, remodelled to be market friendly. So now the United States is fighting wars to install democracies. First is was topple them, now it’s install them. And the whole rise of corporate-funded NGOs in the modern world, this notion of CSR, corporate social responsibility – it’s all part of a New Managed Democracy. In a sense, it’s all part of the same machine.
What was it that gave Ammu this Unsafe Edge? This air of unpredictability? It was what she had battling inside her. An unmixable mix. The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber.
In order to detach caste from the political economy, from conditions of enslavement in which most dalits lived and worked, in order to slide the questions of entitlement, land reforms and the redistribution of wealth, Hindu reformers cleverly narrowed the question of caste to the issue of untouchability. They framed it as an erroneous religious and cultural practice that needed to be reformed.
The Believers come with their guns, their prayer beads and their own Destroy-Yourselves Manual.