Arundhati Roy Talks about Her New Book ‘Capitalism: A Ghost Story’

Arundhati Roy on the buying off of Mandela and ANC by big capital: The engaged intellectual cannot empower people where there is no humility

by Raymond Suttner

According to Arundhati Roy, in part of a talk published on You Tube, 12 June 2013 when the struggle in South Africa  ‘started ‘it was the Black consciousness (BC) people who were most powerful but the ANC killed them, even in the prisons.   When I would like to know, does Ms Roy think the struggle in South Africa started, given that BC was only formed in the mid 1970s?  Was there nothing before then? Or is this history of no consequence in presentations of the character of the struggle against apartheid?

Arundhati Roy on the Protests Against Rape in Delhi

We Call This Progress

By Arundhati Roy, Guernica Magazine
December 17, 2012
From a speech at the Earth at Risk conference, Roy on the misuses of democracy and the revolutionary power of exclusion.

I don’t know how far back in history to begin, so I’ll lay the milestone down in the recent past. I’ll start in the early 1990s, not long after capitalism won its war against Soviet Communism in the bleak mountains of Afghanistan. The Indian government, which was for many years one of the leaders of the nonaligned movement, suddenly became a completely aligned country and began to call itself the natural ally of the U.S. and Israel. It opened up its protected markets to global capital. Most people have been speaking about environmental battles, but in the real world it’s quite hard to separate environmental battles from everything else: the war on terror, for example; the depleted uranium; the missiles; the fact that it was the military-industrial complex that actually pulled the U.S. out of the Great Depression, and since then the economies of places like America, many countries in Europe, and certainly Israel, have had stakes in the manufacture of weapons. What good are weapons if they aren’t going to be used in wars? Weapons are absolutely essential; it’s not just for oil or natural resources, but for the military-industrial complex itself to keep going that we need weapons.

Arundhati Roy et al: Reading Nandigram Wrongly

Reading Nandigram Wrongly by TigersEye99

Capitalism: A Ghost Story

Mukesh Ambani’s 27-storey home on Altamont Road.

by Arundhati Roy, Outlook India

Is it a house or a home? A temple to the new India, or a warehouse for its ghosts? Ever since Antilla arrived on Altamont Road in Mumbai, exuding mystery and quiet menace, things have not been the same. “Here we are,” the friend who took me there said, “Pay your respects to our new Ruler.”

Arundhati Roy on Maoist Violence

Arundhati Roy on the academic inability to grasp popular agency

The tenacity, the wisdom and the courage of those who have been fighting for years, for decades, to bring change, or even the whisper of justice to their lives, is something extraordinary. Whether people are fighting to overthrow the Indian State, or fighting against Big Dams, or only fighting a particular steel plant or mine or SEZ, the bottomline is that they are fighting for their dignity, for the right to live and smell like human beings. They are fighting because, as far as they are concerned, “the fruits of modern development” stink like dead cattle on the highway….

Arundhati Roy on Naxals, Occupy Wall Street

Download program audio (mp3, 43.67 Mbytes), Against the Grain

There is a war going on in the tribal heartland of central and eastern India between the Naxalite Maoists and the Indian state, in which -- Arundhati Roy believes -- much is at stake. The award-winning writer  discusses her time accompanying a group of Maoists in the forests, and the brutal counterinsurgency effort mounted against them by the Indian government. She also talks about the Occupy Wall Street movement and anticapitalism.

Fault Lines: Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy: Revolts and Rebellions

Shall We Leave It to the Experts?

By Arundhati Roy, Outlook India, 2002

India lives in several centuries at the same time. Somehow we manage to progress and regress simultaneously.

As a nation we age by pushing outward from the middle--adding a few centuries on either end of the extraordinary CV. We greaten like the maturing head of a hammerhead shark with eyes looking in diametrically opposite directions.

Arundhati Roy on Maoism in India

Walking With The Comrades

by Arundhati Roy, Outlook India

The terse, typewritten note slipped under my door in a sealed envelope confirmed my appointment with India’s Gravest Internal Security Threat. I’d been waiting for months to hear from them. I had to be at the Ma Danteshwari mandir in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh, at any of four given times on two given days. That was to take care of bad weather, punctures, blockades, transport strikes and sheer bad luck. The note said: “Writer should have camera, tika and coconut. Meeter will have cap, Hindi Outlook magazine and bananas. Password: Namashkar Guruji.”

Ngicelwe ukuba ngikhulume ngokuthi “kungaliwa kanjani noMbuso?” Lo ngumbuzo onzulu, anginazo izimpendulo ezilula

bhalwe ngu – Arundhati Roy yahunyushelwa esiZulwini ngu – Nontobeko Hlela, Abahlali baseMjondolo
 
Uma sikhuluma ngokuphikisana no “Mbuso”, kudingeka sizibuze ukuthi “uMbuso” uchazani? Ngabe uchaza uhulumeni waseMelika (kanye namazwe ezwa yona ase-Europe), iBhange lomhlaba (World Bank), inhlangano yezizwe ebheka izindaba zezimali (International Monetary Fund), noma inhlangano yomhlaba ephathelene nezokuhweba na (World Trade Organization)? Noma mhlawumbe yinto engaphezulu kwalokhu.
Emazweni amaningi lombuso usuzale imixhantela eminye, eminye yalemixhantela evela emaceleni iyingozi – njengoku phakamisa ubuzwe (nationalism), ukucwasana ngokwenkolo, ukuphatha ngengcindezelo nobuhluku, kanye nobuphekula zikhuni. Zonke lezi zinto zihambisana ncamashi kanye nezinhloso ze-corporate globalization.

Response to Chomsky et al. from Arundhati Roy, Sumit Sarkar, Saroj Giri and others

 Sanhati

This report has been published at Kafila

We read with growing dismay the statement signed by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and others advising those opposing the CPI(M)’s pro-capitalist policies in West Bengal not to “split the Left” in the face of American imperialism. We believe that for some of the signatories, their distance from events in India has resulted in their falling prey to a CPI(M) public relations coup and that they may have signed the statement without fully realising the import of it and what it means here in India, not just in Bengal.

The Trickledown Revolution

by Arundhati Roy, Outlook India, 2010

The law locks up the hapless felon
who steals the goose from off the common,
but lets the greater felon loose
who steals the common from the goose.

—Anonymous, England, 1821

Arundhati Roy, Seattle, 2004