Arundhati Roy has won some kind of award for “Cultural Freedom”, whatever that is. To her credit she has shared the award with 50 NGOs in India, but she would have liked to globalise her dissent* a bit. ( Link in PDF, via Ashwini)

I would have liked to share at least part of the money with independent and alternative media groups in the United States ? Democracy Now!, Indymedia, and Alternative Radio ? all of whom are staging a courageous and formidable battle against their own government’s propaganda. Unfortunately, Indian law does not permit me to do this.

The citation for the award calls her writing “precise and powerful”
Excuse me, Precise?

This is from one of her essays. The topic, please note, is the standoff with Pakistan that we had last year:
A dear friend, who is an activist in the anti-dam movement in the Narmanda Valley, is on indefinite hunger strike. Today is the twelfth day of her fast. She and the others fasting with her are weakening quickly. They are protesting because the government is bulldozing schools, felling forests, uprooting handpumps, forcing people from their villages. What an act of faith and hope. But to a government comfortable with the notion of a wasted world, what’s a wasted value?

Terrorists have the power to trigger a nuclear war. Non-violence is treated with contempt. Displacement, dispossession, starvation, poverty, disease, these are all just funny comic strip items now. Meanwhile, emissaries of the coalition against terror come and go preaching restraint. Tony Blair arrives to preach peace – and on the side, to sell weapons to both India and Pakistan. The last question every visiting journalist always asks me: ‘Are you writing another book?’ ( “Under the nuclear shadow” – Guardian )

Precise?

And this is from one of her interminable essays on the war against the Taliban:
And what of the rest of us, the numb recipients of this onslaught of what we know to be preposterous propaganda? The daily consumers of the lies and brutality smeared in peanut butter and strawberry jam being air-dropped into our minds just like those yellow food packets. Shall we look away and eat because we’re hungry, or shall we stare unblinking at the grim theatre unfolding in Afghanistan until we retch collectively and say, in one voice, that we have had enough?

As the first year of the new millennium rushes to a close, one wonders – have we forfeited our right to dream? Will we ever be able to re-imagine beauty?

Will it be possible ever again to watch the slow, amazed blink of a newborn gecko in the sun, or whisper back to the marmot who has just whispered in your ear – without thinking of the World Trade Centre and Afghanistan?( “Brutality Smeared in Peanut Butter” -Guardian)

Arundhati Roy is guilty of stunningly garish imagery, but no one can accuse her of precision.

*One of her famous quotes is “The only thing worth globalising is dissent”.