“Ouch.” That’s what I wrote in the margin of Arundhati Roy’s The End of Imagination today when I read Roy’s critique of the political system in India, the electorate’s party choices, and the pervasive oppression of “counter-terrorism.” In the post-9/11 world, power works in very consistent ways whether in India or the US: power represses, and repression […]
Blasting away tomorrow
I remember reading about Agent Orange in accounts of Vietnam. Zyklon B appeared in reports on Nazi Germany’s concentation camps, and Scud missiles dominated Cold War headlines. When I later studied the lead-up to the 2002 invasion of Iraq, it was WMDs all day: biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons governed by treaties, held illicitly, and responsible […]
Fire, smoke, and dreams (with Arundhati Roy)
In The End of Imagination, Arundhati Roy describes with exquisite pacing what nationalism, fundamentalism, and militarism have yielded across India and Pakistan over the last thirty years. As she recounts the mayhem (including murder, staged terrorism, and activist intimidation in the countryside and on college campuses), Roy also writes of alternatives: An altogether different coalition of castes, one that […]
The uses of religion
I’m only ten pages into Arundhati Roy’s 2016 book of essays, The End of Imagination, and I already have several asterisks and exclamation points in the margins. In the introduction, Roy reviews recent Indian political history to help set the tone for the essays that follow. The theme of India’s history is the “competing horror […]
