Articles by Arundhati Roy

We found 31 results.


“Never Again”: Arundhati Roy on Palestine at Delhi Press Club
Arundhati Roy | The Wire - TRANSCEND Media Service, 25 Mar 2024

8 Mar 2024 – Public meeting held at the New Delhi Press Club to voice opposition to the genocide in Gaza. Arundhati Roy’s statement is titled, “Never Again”.

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With Genocide in Gaza, the Word ‘Never’ Has Been Stripped from ‘Never Again’
Arundhati Roy | Common Dreams – TRANSCEND Media Service, 18 Mar 2024

8 Mar 2024 – They and their children’s children will be haunted by what they have done. They will have to live with the loathing and the abhorrence the world feels for them. [Karma is a bitch.]

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Arundhati Roy: ‘The Damage to Indian Democracy Is Not Reversible’
Arundhati Roy interviewed by CNN - TRANSCEND Media Service, 4 Jul 2022

22 Jun 2022 – Roy says Indian politics has something in common with the US Capitol riots, that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is stoking hatred, and talks about who the real power in India lies with.

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India Is Becoming a Hindu-Fascist Enterprise
Arundhati Roy | Al Jazeera – TRANSCEND Media Service, 20 Jun 2022

17 Jun 2022 – The practice of bulldozing Muslim homes and businesses for purely punitive reasons is proof that India is ‘transitioning pretty brazenly into a criminal Hindu fascist enterprise.’

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Arundhati Roy on America’s Fiery, Brutal Impotence
Arundhati Roy | The Economist - TRANSCEND Media Service, 6 Sep 2021

3 Sep 2021 – The US leaves Afghanistan humiliated, but now faces bigger worries, from social polarisation to environmental collapse. If empires and their outposts need to plunder the Earth to maintain their hegemony, it doesn’t matter if the plundering is driven by American, European, Chinese or Indian capital. These are not really the conversations that we should be having. Because while we’re busy talking, the Earth is busy dying.

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‘We Are Witnessing a Crime against Humanity’: Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid Catastrophe
Arundhati Roy | The Guardian - TRANSCEND Media Service, 3 May 2021

28 Apr 2021 – It’s hard to convey the full depth and range of the trauma, the chaos and the indignity that people are being subjected to. Meanwhile, Modi and his allies are telling us not to complain.

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India’s Hindu Right Are Willing to Bury Democracy
Arundhati Roy | Scroll - TRANSCEND Media Service, 12 Oct 2020

Two Conspiracies and a Cremation: Let’s keep voting for the people who are leading us into penury and war, tearing us apart limb from limb. While India’s rulers downplay the brutal murder of a Dalit teenager by an upper-caste gang and acquit Hindu nationalists guilty of historic crimes, they are concocting another show trial of Muslims and progressive activists to intimidate dissenters.

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India: What Lies Ahead?
Arundhati Roy | The Paris Review – TRANSCEND Media Service, 28 Sep 2020

15 Sep 2020 – Only a year into his second term, through a series of horrifying moves, Modi has changed India beyond recognition. The infrastructure of fascism is staring us in the face, the pandemic is speeding up that process in unimaginable ways, and yet we hesitate to call it by its name. What lies ahead? Reimagining the world. Only that.

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Modi’s Brutal Treatment of Kashmir Exposes His Tactics – And Their Flaws
Arundhati Roy | The Guardian - TRANSCEND Media Service, 24 Aug 2020

At midnight on 4 August 2019, phones in Kashmir went dead and internet connections were cut. On 5 August 2019, a year ago today, 7 million people were locked into their homes under a strict military curfew. Up to 10,000 people, from young children and teenage stone pelters to former chief ministers and major pro-India politicians, were arrested and put into preventive detention, where many of them still remain. On 6 August, a bill was passed in parliament stripping the state of Jammu and Kashmir of its autonomy and special status enshrined in the Indian constitution. It was stripped of statehood, downgraded into two union territories, Ladakh, and Jammu and Kashmir. Ladakh would have no legislature and would be governed directly by New Delhi.

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Arundhati Roy: ‘The Pandemic Is a Portal’
Arundhati Roy | Financial Times - TRANSCEND Media Service, 13 Apr 2020

3 Apr 2020 – “Who can use the term ‘gone viral’ now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything any more — a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables — without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs?” The novelist on how coronavirus threatens India–and what the country, and the world, should do next.

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The Graveyard Talks Back: Arundhati Roy on Fiction in the Time of Fake News
Arundhati Roy | Literary Hub – TRANSCEND Media Service, 16 Mar 2020

12 Feb 2020 – Text of the 2020 Clark Lecture in English Literature Instituted by Trinity College, Cambridge – What is the Role of the Writer in a Time of Rising Nationalism?

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India: Intimations of an Ending
Arundhati Roy – The Nation, 25 Nov 2019

22 Nov 2019 – The rise of Modi and the Hindu far right. While protest reverberates on the streets of Chile, Catalonia, Britain, France, Iraq, Lebanon, and Hong Kong, and a new generation rages against what has been done to their planet, I hope you will forgive me for speaking about a place where the street has been taken over by something quite different.

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Systemic Failure
Arundhati Roy – TRANSCEND Media Service, 30 Sep 2019

Input => Output

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Meeting Ed Snowden – “We Brought You the Promise of the Future, but Our Tongue Stammered and Barked…” (II)
Arundhati Roy – Outlook India, 16 Nov 2015

My phone rang at three in the morning. It was John Cusack asking me if I would go with him to Moscow to meet Edward Snowden…

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Meeting Ed Snowden – What Shall We Love? (IV)
Arundhati Roy – Outlook India, 16 Nov 2015

The Moscow Un-Summit wasn’t a formal interview. Nor was it a cloak-and-dagger underground rendezvous. The upshot is that we didn’t get the cautious, diplomatic, regulation Edward Snowden. We talked about war and greed, about terrorism and an accurate definition of it. We spoke about countries, flags and the meaning of patriotism.

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(Italiano) La politica con altri mezzi
Arundhati Roy – Z Net Italy, 16 Nov 2015

Arundhati Roy spiega perché restituisce il suo Premio Nazionale alla massima istituzione letteraria dell’India.

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‘Intolerance Is the Wrong Word for the Lynching and Mass Murder of Human Beings’ in India
Arundhati Roy, Conscientious Objector – TRANSCEND Media Service, 9 Nov 2015

5 Nov 2015 – The respected author has issued a statement about her decision to return the national film award she won in 1989 for writing the screenplay of ‘In which Annie Gives It Those Ones’.

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How Corporate Power Converted Wealth into Philanthropy for Social Control
Arundhati Roy - AlterNet, 22 Sep 2014

What follows might appear to be a harsh critique. On the other hand, in the tradition of honoring one’s adversaries, it could be an acknowledgment of the vision, flexibility, sophistication, and unwavering determination of those who dedicated their lives to keeping the world safe for capitalism. There’s a lot of money in poverty, and a few Nobel Prizes too.

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The NGO-ization of Resistance
Arundhati Roy, Massalijn – TRANSCEND Media Service, 22 Sep 2014

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.

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The Doctor and the Saint: Ambedkar, Gandhi and the Battle against Caste
Arundhati Roy – The Caravan, 10 Mar 2014

Arundhati Roy raises many important questions regarding the contributions of Gandhi and Ambedkar. She does it brilliantly and courageously.

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Re-Imagining a World beyond Capitalism and Communism
Arundhati Roy – TRANSCEND Media Service, 25 Feb 2013

Here in India, even in the midst of all the violence and greed, there is still hope. If anyone can do it, we can. We still have a population that has not yet been completely colonized by that consumerist dream. If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate-change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings. It lives low down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them.

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Capitalism: A Ghost Story
Arundhati Roy, Outlook India - The Gandhi Foundation, 30 Apr 2012

Rockefeller to Mandela, Vedanta to Anna Hazare…. How long can the cardinals of corporate gospel buy up our protests?

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The Dead Begin to Speak Up In India
Arundhati Roy – The Guardian, 3 Oct 2011

So somebody who wants to invest in a dam, or build a steel plant or a buy a bauxite mine is not considered a security hazard, whereas a scholar who might wish to participate in a seminar about, say, displacement or communalism or rising malnutrition in a globalised economy, is. Terrorists with bad intentions have probably guessed that they are better off wearing Prada suits and pretending they want to buy a mine than admitting that they want to attend a seminar.

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I’d Rather Not Be Anna
Arundhati Roy – The Hindu, 29 Aug 2011

While his means maybe Gandhian, his demands are certainly not.

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Inciting Mob Anger Against Me
Arundhati Roy – TRANSCEND Media Service, 8 Nov 2010

On October 31, 2010 members of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, which has links with neo-fascist organizations, gathered outside Roy’s home in New Dehli and chanted slogans for half an hour. The group vandalized property outside a security gate, and then broke onto the grounds of the home. Roy was not present at the time of the attack. Roy, the celebrated author of the novel The God of Small Things and of several non-fiction books, including Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, issued this statement after the attack, drawing particular attention to the apparent collaboration of the Indian media with the mob that carried out the attack.

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The Trickledown Revolution
Arundhati Roy – The Dawn, 20 Sep 2010

On the sixty-fourth anniversary of India’s Independence, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh climbed into his bullet-proof soap box in the Red Fort to deliver a passionless, bone-chillingly banal speech to the nation. Listening to him, who would have guessed that he was addressing a country that, despite having the second highest economic growth rate in the world, has more poor people than 26 of Africa’s poorest countries put together?

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WHAT HAVE WE DONE TO DEMOCRACY?
Arundhati Roy, 3 Oct 2009

The U.S. and Europe Have Propped Up So Many Corrupt "Democracies" That the Word Is Losing Meaning Of Nearsighted Progress, Feral Howls, Consensus, Chaos, and a New Cold War in KashmirWhat’s next in a world where democracy has been so hollowed out? While we’re still arguing about whether there’s life after death, can we add […]

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BUSINESS AS USUAL: VEDANTA MINE PLANS THREATEN INDIA’S POOREST
Arundhati Roy, 28 Jul 2009

An ecosystem destroyed. A way of life gone forever. Private profit and public pain. And we call this progress? Bauxite mountains are part of a very delicate ecosystem. The mining of bauxite and the process by which it is turned into aluminum is among the most toxic, environmentally devastating processes imaginable. If Vedanta is allowed […]

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IS THERE LIFE AFTER DEMOCRACY?
Arundhati Roy, 8 Jul 2009

While we’re still arguing about whether there’s life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By democracy I don’t mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: Western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as […]

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THE SILENCE SURROUNDING SRI LANKA
Arundhati Roy, 1 Apr 2009

New Delhi – The Horror that is unfolding in Sri Lanka becomes possible because of the silence that surrounds it. There is almost no reporting in the international press – or in the mainstream media in India, where I live – about what is happening. From the little information that is filtering through, it looks […]

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9 IS NOT 11
Arundhati Roy and Tom Engelhardt, 13 Dec 2008

The single omnipresent historical reference in the American media immediately in the wake of September 11, 2001, was, of course, "Pearl Harbor" – and those code words for it, "infamy" and "day of infamy," splashed in mile-high letters across the front pages of papers. What we had experienced, it was commonly said then, was "the […]

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