Isn’t there a flaw in the logic of that phrase – speak truth to power? It assumes that power doesn’t know the truth. But power knows the truth just as well, if not better, than...

At least not until the Terror took hold of him. Not until he saw, night after night, a little boat being rowed across the river. Not until he saw it return at dawn. Not until...

The sky was thick with TV. If you wore special glasses you could see them spinning through the sky among the bats and homing birds—blondes, wars, famines, football, food shows, coups d’état, hairstyles stiff with...

And a strange, deadly war is raging around the world. Yet, each person who has lost a loved one surely knows secretly, deeply, that no war, no act of revenge, no daisy-cutters dropped on someone...

The English-language press in India supports the project of corporate globalization fully. It has no time for dispossession and drought and farmers’ debts, the ravages that the corporate globalization project is wreaking on the poor...

This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.

When you live in the United States, with the roar of the free market, the roar of this huge military power, the roar of being at the heart of empire, it’s hard to hear the...

The steel door of the incinerator went up and the muted hum of the eternal fire became a red roaring. The heat lunged out at them like a famished beast. Then Rahel’s Ammu was fed...

It wasn’t what lay at the end of her road that frightened Ammu as much as the nature of the road itself. No milestones marked its progress. No trees grew along it. No dappled shadows...

I’m not talking about being against development. I’m talking about the politics of development. I’m talking about more development, not less. More democracy, not less. More modernization, not less. How do you break down this...

Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is peace.

Searching for the Man who lives in him was perhaps what he really meant, because certainly no beast has essayed the boundless, infinitely inventive art of human hatred. No beast can match its range and...

As for the third Official Reason: exposing Western Hypocrisy – how much more exposed can they be? Which decent human being on earth harbors any illusions about it? These are people whose histories are spongy...

Ammu watched over them fiercely. Her watchfulness stretched her, made her taut and tense. She was quick to reprimand her children, but even quicker to take offense on their behalf.

We hear all this talk about integrating the world economically, but there is an argument to be made for not integrating the world economically. Because what is corporate globalization? It isn’t as if the entire...

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness,...

But can we, should we, let apprehensions about the future immobilize us in the present?

Somewhere along the way, Capitalism reduced the idea of justice to mean just “human rights,” and the idea of dreaming of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to tinker with reforming a system that...

When those who had been evicted went back to where they came from, they found their villages had disappeared under great dams and dusty quarries. Their homes were occupied by hunger-and policemen. The forests were...

…glanced up and caught Ammu’s gaze. Centuries telescoped into one evanescent moment. History was wrong-footed, caught off guard. Sloughed off like an old snakeskin. Its marks , its scars its wouns from old wars and...

Growing religious fundamentalism is directly linked to globalization and to privatization. The Indian government is talking about selling its entire power sector to foreign multinationals, but when the consequences of that become hard to manage,...

The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you’re alive and die only when you’re dead.

His gratitude widened his smile and bent his back.

I see a role for specialized knowledge, but I think that it’s important for there to be an arena where it is shared, where it is communicated. It’s not that somebody shouldn’t have specialized knowledge....

The twins were too young to know that these were only history’s henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet...

Their lives have a size and a shape now. Estha has his and Rahel hers.Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long...

In India we’re fighting to retain a wilderness that we have. Whereas in the west, it’s gone. Every person that’s walking down the street is a walking bar code. You can tell where their clothes...

[Internationa] Aid is just another praetorian business enterprise.

At times there’s something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism.Build a dam to take away water AWAY from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to BRING water to 40 million people. Who...

It isn’t a coincidence that the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat happened after September 11. Gujarat is also one place where the toxic waste of the World Trade Center is being dumped right now. This...

They visited him in saris, clumping gracelessly through red mud and long grass … and introduced themselves as Mrs. Pillai, Mrs. Eapen and Mrs. Rajagopalan. Velutha introduced himself and his paralyzed brother Kuttappen (although he...

In a determined reversal of her inherent nature, Kochu Maria now, as a policy, hardly ever believed anything that anybody said.

There are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot – that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways staring eyes.