Arundhati Roy: The Writer And Maverick

Brut India

She is a celebrated novelist. Yet, much of her career has been dedicated to her impassioned non-fiction writing. Her outspokenness has also earned her the tag of being an anti-national. She turned 61 this week.

Transcript

00:00India is placed in a very very strange and interesting time just now where on

00:08the one hand you're trying to shrug off the legacy of colonialism and on the

00:12other hand you're welcoming in this kind of new McDonald's, Coca-Cola you know

00:18this economic liberalization and then different kind of colonization that's

00:23happening and there's very little space to maneuver between those two things but

00:28it does provide a lot of a lot of soul-searching and a lot of strange

00:34moral dilemmas which are the substance of literature.

00:58I think there are writers who are wonderful, writers who aren't like in any other country you know.

02:58Music

03:24I know that whatever anyone thinks or says or doesn't say about my book it's

03:30absolutely the best I could have done so if somebody criticizes it it's like

03:35someone telling me that they don't like my gallbladder or my liver, my

03:40intestines are too curly or you know I mean it's too bad it's that's that's the

03:45way it is you know and that's the way I write and that's the way I think.

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04:47She said I stand by what I have said and I am prepared to suffer the consequences.

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05:38To hang somebody for something that he may not have done would be a terrible crime.

05:46So I think that Afzal has not been properly represented and this whole event should actually have a parliamentary enquiry. Thank you.

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07:18India is a great finance destination right so if India suddenly nationalizes

07:25resources you would hear about lynching and child killing and people being

07:31impaled on tridents but as long as the market is open we are a friendly democracy.

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07:52There are thousands of people who are in jail, there are writers who have been shot.

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09:01In some ways you could argue that this particular pandemic came as a political

09:09gift to this government because it was seeing a crisis which it didn't know how

09:16to deal with, with the massive uprising of students, of young people, of the left, of

09:23lots of Muslims in fury over this and fury and fear over the new citizenship law.

09:31Even the government itself I think is full of people who are full of frightened people

09:38because everybody's major preoccupation is how to please Modi.

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10:05Is there something about you that needs this attrition?

10:08God knows you must ask them.

10:15Silence.

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