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.
In the year she knew him, before they were married, she discovered a little magic in herself, and for a while felt like a blithe genie released from a lamp. She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.
Terrorism is vicious, ugly, and dehumanizing for its perpetrators as well as its victims. But so is war. You could says that terrorism is the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketeers of war. They are people who don’t believe that the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
For the first time in her life, Tilo felt that her body had enough room to accomodate all of its organs.
Baby Kochamma grudged them their moments of high happiness when a dragonfly they’d caught lifted a small stone off their palms with its legs, or when they had permission to bathe the pigs, or they found an egg hot form a hen. But most of all, she grudged them the comfort they drew from each other. She expected from them some token unhappiness. At the very least.
In moments of crisis it helps to take the long view.
All three of them bonded by the certain, separate knowledge that they had loved a man to death.
For the Time Being they had no surname because Ammu was considering reverting to her maiden name, though she said that choosing between her husband‘s name and her fathers name didn’t give a woman much of a choice.
Our lungs are gradually being depleted of oxygen. Perhaps it’s time to use whatever breath remains in our bodies to say: Open the bloody gates.
It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag.
The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around eventually comes around.
Questions signified a vulgar display of ignorance.
The Marxists worked from within the communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to. They offered a cocktail revolution. A heady mix of Eastern Marxism and orthodox Hinduism, spiked with a shot of democracy.
It was not entirely his fault that he lived in a society where a man’s death could be more profitable than his life had ever been.
He broke the eggs but burned the omelette.
Estha carried them home in the crowded train. A quite bubble floating in a sea of noise.
A few months later Miss Mitten was killed by a milk van in Hobart, across the road from a cricket oval. To the twins there was hidden justice in the fact that the milk van had been reversing.