Empathy sometimes achieves what scholarship cannot.
India lives in several centuries at the same time.
Some things come with their own punishments. Like bedrooms with built-in cupboards. They would all learn more about punishments soon. That they came in different sizes. That some were so big they were like cupboards with built-in bedrooms.
Margaret Kochamma found herself drawn towards him like a plant in a dark room towards a wedge of light.
An unmixable mix. The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber.
It’s a battle of those who know how to think against those who know how to hate.
Hope lies in texts that can accommodate and keep alive our intricacy, our complexity, and our density against the onslaught of the terrifying, sweeping simplifications of fascism.
Does a country fall into fascism the way a person falls in love? Or, more accurately, in hate?
It’s a battle of those who know how to think against those who know how to hate. A battle of lovers against haters. It’s an unequal battle, because the love is on the street and vulnerable. The hate is on the street, too, but it is armed to the teeth, and protected by all the machinery of the state.
Something lay buried in the ground. Under grass. Under twenty-three years of June rain. A small forgotten thing. Nothing that the world would miss. A child’s plastic wristwatch with the time painted on it. Ten to two, it said.
But Kama the Generous could not refuse his mother what she asked of him. So he modified the promise. Equivocated. Made a small adjustment, took a somewhat altered oath.
Ammu recognized vaguely that her thoughts were shot with a delicate, purple tinge of envy. She didn’t allow herself to consider who it was that she envied. The man or her own child. Or just their world of hooked fingers and sudden smiles.
History has been unkind to Ambedkar. First it contained him, and then it glorified him. It has made him India’s Leader of the Untouchables, the King of the Ghetto. It has hidden away his writings. It has stripped away the radical intellect and the searing insolence.
Mohabbat goliyon se bo rahe ho Watan ka chehra khoon se dho rahe ho Gumaan tum ko ke rasta katt raha hai Yaqeen mujhko ke manzil kho rahe ho.
Ironically, the era of the free market has led to the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in India – the secession of the middle and upper classes to a country of their own, somewhere up in the stratosphere where they merge with the rest of the world’s elite. This Kingdom in the Sky is a complete universe in itself, hermetically sealed from the rest of India. It has its own newspapers, films, television programmes, morality plays, transport systems, malls, and intellectuals.
The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.
Indians who valorize their own struggle for independence from British rule and virtually worship those who led it are for the most part strangely opaque to Kashmiris who are fighting for the same thing.
India asks us, ‘Why do you throw stones?’ No one asks, ‘Who burned your house down?
The place for literature is built by writers and readers. It’s a fragile place in some ways, but an indestructible one. When it’s broken, we rebuild it. Because we need shelter. I very much like the idea of literature that is needed. Literature that provides shelter. Shelter of all kinds.
There’s a lot of money in poverty, and a few Nobel Prizes too.
The frozen flowers never go away. They hang around somewhere all the time.