Transcripts For CSPAN2 Arundhati Roy My Seditious Heart 20240713

Before introduce Arundhati Roy, i want to tantillo business. I want to thank the organizers sponsor of this teaching, haymarket books. Haymarket is a publisher of a number of books including the absolutely extraordinary collection of nonfiction essays written over 20 years. My seditious heart and a fourth coming book, azadi freedom. Fascism. Fiction which concludes with the essay, the pandemic is the portal which is the title of an foundation for our conversation today. Haymarket also publishes other critical radical thinkers such as angela davis, naomi klein, and so many others. In this moment in which we are reckoning with crises, with suffering, with deep injustice, its especially important for us to support critical thinkers, freedom fighters, and as part of that task i would encourage you all to buy books from a market, to join the haymarket book club. We are inviting people to make donations to the publisher during this discussion, and there will be information on the screen about how you can do so. This video will be recorded and also shared afterwards on the haymarket books youtube channel. You are invited to subscribe to this channel, to like this figure, to share it, and on that channel you can see the number of wonderful events that are already taken place. And there will be a special program on may day this year, may 1, at 5 p. M. , a discussion between stacey davis skates and senator nelson on a workingclass vision for the future featuring and at 7 p. M. On may 1st a poet will be hosting a special maybe online Poetry Reading with stacy and martin and a number of other important artists. Just a little more housekeeping. With so solar people joining te call today, we may need your forbearance if we have any technical issues. If your stream gets choppy, i would suggest that you reduce your image quality, and or the instructions on how to do so in the chat. We will post please, asking you to please post questions on the live video feed for from ovr you watching it. You can do that on the youtube channel, they spoke. You can comment and also respond to the video on twitter if you have any questions. Now its my pleasure to bring in Arundhati Roy who joins us from new delhi. And i just would say at the very brief introduction, as with so many people around the world, arundhati is a critical thinker was thinking and critical work and clarity and brilliance and integrity and ethical witness deeply inspired me. I cherish her voice, her character, everything that she writes loosely over and over again. I essentially have a practice, if theres something she has written i immediately read it. It really is transformative work, so thank you, arundhati, and welcome. Thank you. How lovely to see you again. Really lovely in these troubled times. I want to begin with the word portal, and for me and i suspect for so many people it resonated deeply. Its an architectural word. Its a technological word, and i love sort of the way in which its a metaphor but theres something literal about it that we are cocreators in this moment of the way forward. I wonder if you could Say Something about that choice of word and the work that it does for you and for us . I think it had to do with some out it had to do with my [inaudible] when we were locked down and i was thinking do we have a present, you know . Because somehow it feels as if we dont have present, as if there is a past and theres a future, and the present is in the lounge, you know, sort of echoes of the past and the premonition of the future, the kind of to our future. We cant go to the present. When i was thinking about so much of it is set in a graveyard, is that just a graveyard for dying. Theres a moment to talk about that holds the gates open. For people to come and go. For different ways to meet. And i said because i think just as the world has been frozen, you, me, everyone listening and almost anyone else in the world, even a moment of contemplation and isolation, and perhaps able to think of a way of trying to undo the terrible wounds that have been inflicted by the human race on this planet that we live in. At the same time that our people who are just the complete opposite or lets say you and me, who are preparing to move through this order, deepening the injustice, centralizing the data thinking of more and more ways of controlling and afflicting more and more damage. I really think that when i said we have to decide whether we want to work through it nicely or whether we want to drive the caucuses of our prejudice and hatred and dead ideas. I think it was, i said we went i know that even though i know its such a huge conflict in the world and you cant use that word. If it was in the hope that even the people who has so far commuted the word to where it is now, use this moment to think and move behind some luggage and walk through it. What you just said sort of draws me to one of the things i think is a conundrum of this moment in that the virus itself betrays rules of borders and statuses, you know, that word pandemic is so powerful because it reaches the on the boundaries of human creation. And yet we have an architecture of the social relations that keeps suffering upon suffering for some, right, and allows for the creation of sort of some kind of form of protection for others. I wonder if, as you say this moment of contemplation, how we get to the point where we both sort of our reckoning with the human connection, right, are sort of collective humanity and yet also seems to me so important to keep hold of the fact that this is not affecting everyone the same way. Not at all. In fact, i think what it is done, this virus, is it looks like an mri on society, countries, and expose you know, almost the same way that the virus seems to prey on people who have with the call comorbidity. Its doing the same thing socially, society. Its expanding and amplifying all the weaknesses, all the injustices, all the relations and all the costs, all of that, and in trying you know, in the u. S. , i mean, for example, your reading more and more in the u. S. And the uk, how its affecting africanamerican communities much more than others. In india, Something Else has happened, which is the virus itself has not made itself so manifest yet. Although you cant trust the numbers because we one of the lowest testing rates in the world, and what a lot of the tests seem to suggest that you dont know. I mean, some people suggest its lower ninth stream. Some people suggest that he is the reason white has a really got its claws into us. But the steps that we are taking towards handling the crisis that is yet to, has painted such a huge crisis, and that crisis has affected the poorer, unimaginably, unimaginably. So both cases, the cure as well as the illness in america or in europe, that is expose disproportionally how unjust those societies are. Can you talk a bit more about how thats manifest in india, this sort of response to the virus itself . How that has unfolded. You know, a few things happen which is that the first case of covid was recorded here in india on the 30th of january. But between 30 january and right up to midmarch nothing was really known, nobody paid any attention. There were other things to do. There was a huge crisis, a political crisis in india, because of the antimuslim relationship. There were massive protests, and sentenced up to 1 Million People the street. Mostly led by women, mostly led by muslim women, complete, completely nonviolent. It was come in what was a very suddenly you had people come out and defend an idea of diversity, of secularism. You had poetry. There was a resistant that clearly was hot. This moment, you know, promulgated in a massacre in delhi. Hindu vigilante mob attacked the working muslim class, about 50 people were killed because people were prepared for this and fought back. Bodies were still being pulled out. In fact, killings happen when trump was here. Trump arrived in the last week of february in india so what was already making its way but you had 100,000 people to greet him in the stadium. Gave 1. 38 billion people from 8 pm to midnight and said there was going to be a lockdown. Everything will be shot, mass transport wouldnot be available to anybody. So the next day, suddenly the cities of india were a technical experiment in dehumanizing people who are crowned into the outskirts and into dickensian sentiment like buildings. You know, cramped quarters which are actually factory floors. Working with construction and im talking about Many Industries , the 24th of the month they hadnt got food, the landlords told them there was no mass transport and these are all people who are basically from villages. Who are young men who come to work in the city. Who supplement their income, and in an agrarian economy and they had no food, no money so they began to trek back home, like hundreds of kilometers. So this kind of biblical exodus of people, just walking up mostly men but women and children, walking these hundreds of kilometers to their villages. I had a media card so i went out and walked a little while to the border. I spoke to people and it was, you know, then there were so many videos that i dont know if you saw them. Of people being brutalized. Not just beaten but humiliated. Made to jump down. Others were caught and hosed down with chemicals. Some people had been walking for days were stopped and told they must go back to where they came from because they would be setting off riots. Some people after days of walkingreached their villages but werent allowed in. And that situation remained as such right now where you have a hunger crisis, then you have this heated crisis with what is happening in the muslim community. You have an Unemployment Crisis which was already a crisis before that started and you have a lockdown where the Prime Minister of this huge country without even consulting the chief ministers, just ordered this lockdown. Now the problem is how do you unburden that barrier . There is a shift that converts into a world which is veryhard to know how to come out of. And that it was already reeling under of the Health Crisis. You had a 25 percent cases in the world in india which is millions of people and every day about 1400 people die of tv. You have now nutrition and little children, almost 1 million children, 800 something thousand children die of dehydration. And now this huge Health Crisis which of course just like in europe has Public Health and privatized so now you have 20 percent of the Public Health system trying to deal with this massive crisis and these Health Issues have only been put on hold. So today you talk about the contours of the real crisis. One of the things that i so appreciated that you wrote about is the manner in which sort of something about the us that has been revealed to the world in this moment. And that description you offered, what becomes clear is the thread of connection for working people all over the globe. With what the ways in which this virus is still sort of stackingupon them. And one of the things that i have been astonished by, just watching news both nationally in the states but also internationally is that even at it as thats happening, we are being sort of said this idolatry about markets and economy and the institutions that we are supposed to have this kind of worshipful relationship to. This idea that one has to support this world of business that already doesnt tend to the majority of people around the world. And so i think it reveals that its a requirement that we have to educate ourselves. What to have faith in. Where to place our energy and at the same time, theres this urgency. As you said, the moment of contemplation, of potential transformation and it also feels as if theres this urgency that we cant wait and its another one ofthose push polls of the moment. And im just thinking, wondering how you i dont know, distribute your attention or your communication, especially since we are so isolated about how to both dodge the potential transformation and also deal with the immediacy of the daily suffering. Its a very dangerous position that all of us are in rightnow , because you see we talk about the immediacy of the daily suffering and what it is doing in a place like the us. And whats happening, i mean, ive spoken about the hunger and the natural system here but while this lockdown is uponus , while all of us are locked into our home there is no lockdown on totalitarianism. There is no lockdown on the massive amount of arrests thats happening daily and around young students, mostly muslims who are all the people who are seen as having been part of that protest. Theyre now being accused of murder and all kinds of outlandish things and going to prison but i think what youre seeing is very important because i find myself wondering and even wondering if one can bear to wonder about this. But while everybody is so freely using the vocabulary of war to speak about this virus and im thinking but war is about killing people and presumably what youre doing is about healing people. But i think it has to do with the systems and the peculiar imagination where we and especially western society contain inside these ideas of a civilized and a progressive and all that. Theres fundamentally this idea of adulation. In the Nuclear Weapons program, the Weapons Program and the biological Weapons Program and its held up with this adulation. Goldilocks Ecological Systems in order to be able to expect what the capitalist market needs. So we already know that these wars, there being so cruel. The kind of bombing of afghanistan. The sanctions on iraq with syria. Theyre searching around for a vaccine for this virus and when the sanctions wereon in iraq , the medicine was denied to people and that was considered a fine strategy. So how do you really think about the fact that these very people, this very formation that is dealing with this pandemic and trying to serve people in whatever way they are doing in hospitals and using you know, money and all of that. That feeling, that power structure is prepared to move towards creating a Climate Crisis which will make the coronavirus look benign. So what are we supposed to think of that intelligence . How do we communicate to human beings that if thats happening now, weve got to walk through this portal so that we dont want this earth to be destroyed. Can we collectively, because its not going to be given to us. Were going to have to fight for it but to fight for it youre going to have to realize that this suffering is going to bemanifold. Many times over, if its something that doesntchange at the policy level. Not just at the level of lets all be whatever, at a policy level. And how are we going to make that happen . So thats is actually immediate. Its not policy, its actually a very immediate moment that we do have to seize because the plans to do otherwise on. Right now its happening, right now whats happening is that nationally , authoritarianism is colluding with International Disaster capital and they are preparing another world for us. Which will be you know, if corporate globalization was advanced capitalism, now were going to move and they would like us to move into an even more advanced version of that where you have the Gates Foundation owning, the who deciding Public Policy and how to make massive profits out of whatever is going to roll out. And that really was, if we were sleepwalking into a sovereign state, now we are panic running towards it. And its, there is that for me, related to what youre saying, the feeling that there is such an extension of surveillance in this moment and submission and this idea that we have to submit to the authoritarian powers in order to protect ourselves but it really is as you are saying such a privatized notion of even protecting ourselves. Not about policy and also not about the earth as a whole. This shared space, so that we agree to being asked extra surveilled in every possible way. In india right now, its really, theres a sort of act that the Prime Minister asked people to download and theres this fastest downloaded app in the world. Millions ofpeople have downloaded it. The ideas of privacy or any kind of protection of your data, that doesnt exist but the thing is maybe you are alert to the use oflanguage but to me , its terrifying when i read the papers and i read people who may or may not have the virus. The whole ministry process sent out a circular saying when the lockdown opens, if a person joins an office and is found to have the virus, they will be criminallyprosecuted. So now you have people who are asymptomatic who have no idea that they are sick and now they are going to be criminalized or you have another circuit who says the workers walking home who are remaining in the city, they wont be allowed to go home. When things open up. But they will be checked and if they do not have the virus , they will be. Their work will be profiled and industries whichare allowed to reopen can use them. So we see all this being put into place. This extremely is disturbing. Is somebody going to be checked if there well or not well . If there well, what consequences . So this kind of continuing to place these notions which will just have serious outlandish consequences sometime ago and we rush to embrace them. We rush to embrace electronic incarceration and humiliation. Its very disturbing. Its fascinating to me that i on the one hand, there are these new technologies of incarceration. What you described just reminded me of a man who was brutalized and arrested in philadelphia for not wearinga mask. By police officers, which was exactly the opposite of social distancing but then it becomes another way to legitimize policing and state violence. And i was also thinking that we have these technological forms of surveillance and then we very kind of oldfashioned forms of brutality and domination. And one of the questions that came in and i wanted to sort of modify it a little bit but it was about the way that your metaphor of traveling light and light luggage. And thinking about that in light of when you wrote about the long march, i also thought about the trail of tears in the United States and the role of Indigenous People and youve written about that more recent history. And also the Transatlantic Slave Trade and forms of deportation and the partition. Theres physically moving people about and so i guess the question is how you in some ways are subverting that with talking about traveling light with a different kind of movement that has a resistance to it. Obviously that light or metaphorically light was used because in truth, when you look at real travel, its the ritual of traveling light. You have to take all your belongings. So but this traveling light of course was metaphoric of the ability to leave behind old ideas. Ive tried to explain to somebody recently and they said can you explain what that means and i said you know, many years ago or a few years ago i wrote about the kind of war thats taking place in central india where the government basically has handed over Forest Industries and mountains to Mining Companies and these are all Indigenous People who in fact had been handed over. So theres actually a war, a guerrilla war being fought there. And i of course had gone into those forests and spent weeks with the guerrillas but one of the things that i learned was you go to fuel the flattopped mountains because the mountains usually are bauxite mountains and bauxite is this stone thats on the top of the mountain and it actually works as a water stone and it starts as water and the mountains basically let the water out and leaves behind food and gold and so i wrote seeing that that there are two imaginations. One imagination, in one imagination that bauxite is in the mountain. You have to take it out of the mountain and you have to sell it and its of course how you make a living. You need bauxite to make a living and for the other imagination, the bauxite is only worth anything inside the mountain. So that sai ended with a question. Can we leave the bauxite in the mountain . Can we arrive at that intelligence . Because unless we can come to that, at some point we will not want to think of the resources. The resource is a bad word to use for mountains, because that itself is the end of imagination but anyway, can you leave the bauxite in the mountain . Thats what i mean when i say traveling light. Can we change our way of thinking about things like that . I guess that is so incredibly profound, especially now as we witness the earth healing itself the cause theres less pollution and the animals are roaming more freely and theres something about the way in which so manyindustries have slowed down. You begin to see almost a kind of regeneration taking place. And then on the other hand, in a place like Coastal Louisiana where theres an area referred to as cancer alley where you have the highest rate of deaths because of the consequences of all of the environmental destruction from the bp oil spill and years of this extractingtechnology. I think can we form the imagination . Its so profound and what many of the people who are writing in with questions are also asking a related question which is sort of how do we help people imagine working together across the boundaries of the nationstate . It is these specific events in times and places that the lesson they teach is repeated. All across the globe. Its actually very difficult because the virus has jumped over International Orders Like International capital jumps over borders but its incarcerated people. It only works if you can incarcerate people drive in the drive for profit, you can keep undermining how much labor and so on. So in a way strengthening nationalism and nationstate borders. We think of the virus, whats happening in america and whats happening in italy and whats happening in your. Whats happening in kerala, everything is, we break it down into units which are divided into how its divided by human beings, how its policed human beings. But ultimately, what is happening now is the fear of what this virus has done i suppose is the year of the long supply chain. Theres a sense in which people are now wanting to be more selfsufficient. Once again, boarded as an information state but within the nature of a country like india which is really a continent and a lot of countries, you see i imagine that people do, these particular workers who are being treated like property. So badly. Are they going to, i mean maybe they will have to come back and re employ this machinery that has illuminated them and brutalized them in the way in which it happens. But on the other hand, for the last 20 years, one has been writing about the fact that you are brutalizing the countryside and pushing millions of people in these institutions. You cancontrol them. Or you can monitor them or you can depoliticize them. In india in fact, the villages, the countryside has been often wear the great improvements have risen. So can we actually, can we actually reconnect to the land, its a very important question because what has happened with the market is that you have this disavowed what lands can do. And instead, that is what that land supports. But now you want to grow rice in the desert. So you take the water there, then you sailing eyes the desert and you dont know what to do. Your people are growing cash crops. But theyre not growing food that they finish. Theres so many kinds of growing. So theres so nutritious because that is how the market works. Are we going to, i think this journey should make us all these questions. To me, i once said that 20 years or 23 years of writing this, when someone asks you one question like what is, i see thats the good violence, you have to ask like that because the world is relative because of the movements of efficiency. And so each of these positions there could have been another. For each bigband, there was another solution so you have to endure it like you undo looking. And thats, the point about the landing is so profound to me because i think often times people think of those who are intellectuals were created as or just a engaged people that the realm of the imagination is not material in fact, the political imagination has to be material. Its what does it mean to imagine a more harmonious relationship to for the ramifications of that, just extract event explicated and. For me, perhaps because i did grow up in a village on the river and i knew every plant and every fish, to me thats made me like a writer. Its made me want to write about this. Right about the landscape and write about even right now in where i live, the lockdown. Its been beautiful in some ways because of the animals but also the animals in the city are going to defend as human beings. Monkeys and crows, all of them free now. I want to read a couple of questions that have come in and also to invite people who have questions to post them or share them. And one of the questions which i think is so profound, but a woman named heather, she asked, when you talk about your process of writing with the recent watching people suffer, feeling intense emotion and observation. How do you cope with that or channel that while you write. I actually you know, when there was a sort of semilockdown in delhi a few days before the big National Lockdown so because here was something that one didnt know politics or anything about this virus. And i thought this is the time to sit down and you really know that this virus perhaps was a benefit and read and think when the big lockdown was announced and this exhibit began i just lost my equanimity. I lost my sense of mind. I went out and i came back on. Anyway, im a pretty haunted person. But one thing about being a writer is i never shy away from feelings. And i feel grateful that i can see. Because to me, thats one of the worst things you can be aswhen you stop feeling. So i feel like i live in this world. Without the protection of even my own skin. There is no separation between me and the world and thats really important to know right now. I feel so many things that have been done to people. So many debates that have happened in the near past. Of debates that people have put themselves into silos and then somehow undermined all forms of solidarity. And now more than ever, we have to deal each other thinking. Fight each others battles and howl and write and think and not protect ourselves but protect other people. Absolutely and i think part of what i feel when i read your work and for me is also part of what i tried to live is that the writing itself is in essence with the greeks, it is with the hope that it is part of that encounter with what it means to exist. Its not just a matter of portable productivity that is from that. For me, the fact of writing is writing is thinking. I write in order to think. Its not a process, its almost talking to myself and trying to try to structure myself and the only way i can do that is when i write. Sometimes i think that the only reason i write is to stop, in order not to lose my sanity. Whereas i would be a crazy person. Absolutely. Another question that came in is can you elaborate about the intersection of the pandemic with military agitations, and cashmere and palestine area. Thats another very important subject. Because in cashmere, the kashmiris know how to be locked down. They were locked down in august when the status was aggregated and locked down under the most dense Community Lockdown in the world for months together. And they had just begun to use the lockdown. And from my day its military lockdown and a political lockdown as this virus lockdown. So in past me i think thats militarily, the armies of the world must be pretty unprepared for this virus and how to deal with it because i dont know how you fight wars with social distancing. But the kashmiri people are probably in one sense, for the fourth time ever, probably more prepared and dont know how to deal with it better than indians. But also, as i said in that speech, the pandemic in india , the lockdown has meant not social distancing physical compression. Being slammed, in mumbai you have the Dar Es Salaam which has about 1 billion people clamp crammed into two square inches. Its compression. 200 people to the toilet. So what sort of the lockdown is that . So the middle classes are socially distancing. And all of that term with practice, so we see the distancing and locked into their homes but the poor are physicallycompressed. But there is more space and people are not living in the same world in which in most cases in india before have people like homes but it has to be an incredibly confusing time for them because this maybe is a lockdown but they dont resent so much because of this image but it is the basic health is kind of has helped probably, come at a time when they are Still Standing by what has been done to them and whats happening in cashmere now just like its happening in the rest of the world. The machinery of the occupation. Machinery of looking into this digestive of pap smears into the body of india. Theres no stop to that. And then thousands of them are still incarcerated. All of that has been going on. Is suggesting that the point you made about physical compression made me think about you know, the present situation in the United States where its just the most incarcerated population and africanamericans are the most sequestered people on theplanet. But the solutions are either, the reality is intense physical compression where the virus is circulating with virtually no medical care or resources for lockdown themselves where people are isolated in the way that is literally destructive of ones psychological or Emotional Wellbeing and one of the, and that point was made to just think about one of the questions that came in. Sort of differently. And the question was how do we safely protect against this wave of fascism for this moment of authoritarianism and i thought about it and i said maybe one cant do it safely. But safety cant be the imperative. But i do wonder about how one witnesses and participates in protests and this moment across these differences and with all of the boundaries that are imposed. By the lockdown or the physical distancing. I think that this point you make about presumed safety, you know, when we talk about us prisons and whos in them. Its really makes you want to , its unbelievable. For in india, to the presence are jammed. I mean, really just bursting at the seams. Theres more and more people incarcerated as we speak. How do we protest . I think what theyre doing now is important and i think it comes as a protest. Which is to understand what is being done to us. That is the fundamental and the most foundational first step. The other thing is that i think this is becoming so true of the United States and also india. Weve begun to think not you and i are many people but a lot of people think that democracy incurs elections and this is the stupidest thing that has happened to us. Elections are just one side of it and one has to just look. Sometimes i look at it as vote for the enemy that you want to have. Some person you like or believe in, thats hard. But the rest of the time, what do we spend our time doing . And i think we have to, a very difficult thing now about how to protect. At this point in time atthis point in time isnt going to last forever. Where not going to have a lockdown forever and its not going to be around forever for sure. Its going away. And that said, you have to understand the business of Digital Civility and also, for example i find it incredible that at this moment, when the crisis of cobit came to the United States, there was somebody who had been talking really before it came about maybe oil. That is sadness and you were looking at a viral candidate, why . And so what is it about us that, i say that the situation is much worse, because in india, we have 32, some terrible decisions by the Prime Minister that have really harmed people. And what is it about the psychology of people that once them to bow down to the tribulation. That is the new thing. That is an incredibly profound question. That seems to be sort of a necessary step towards sort of transformation. Walking through the portal. Its the least of the attachment, the recent release ofattachment to those who dominate. I wonder. Why would any woman in the United States vote for donald trump . After all that he has got to say about us . But they will and they do. Theres this tension i guess because on the one hand , there is, there are those commitments of men and the last couple ofweeks , in the state and i think in even ive seen some of this in the uk as well. People are changing pretty rapidly politically. Though that for example medicare for all is now, ive seen people who were critical of it in the public arena now seem to embrace where its almost this trigger that this moment produces and i guess the question is sort of how to extend beyond the immediacy. This is this virus will last forever to it allowing people to it being kind of a lens through which to look prospectively. I dont know how that happens , but that seems to me to be part of the idea of the portal. Another question that was asked is, and i think many of us seek all of the answers to everything. So i apologize for that. But i think its a good one which is you talk about the police state and this question is typically about india but there are versions of that all over the world. The expansion of a police state. And the way in which it makes it feel difficult to express varying opinions and creatively, creative ways of imagining the future with the very real prospect of being disappeared or literally or theoretically. Sort of and the decision, but also how do we make wise choices about how to resist . Its something that i obviously someone like myself , every, everything that you say that the kind of attack is just relentless. And its remains from so many people and its a constant religious b how to say the things youwant to say. And how to protect yourself in ways and reading the russians. And i think little human beings, what do they bring to. What do they bring to germany and china even now. And in india, some people consorting and some people are allowed to say things and their them really the only formative thing i can get , i really barely managed to figure it out for myself and thats a temporary thing from daytoday. You never know when you flip. Youre going back to say the things that need to be said or be said. There really isnt a formula for it in different spaces and you have to figure it out for yourself. And i would share that its important to be strategic. Its important to know that there is protection now inthe world. Thats we have to make the architecture and the shelter for ourselves. Lately i just feel like my own protection is my freedom. And the writing, the formal sense of protection, what happened over the last few years and that has been accelerated in honestly by this virus. Every institution of checks and balances as thelast. So what is happening in the courts, what the police are doing. And you know, you spoke about beating upsomeone because he was wearing a mask , theyll be to death someone who went out. But what is happening with muslims and how they are being treated, all of this to speak about it like i said, all these young people have been incarcerated now so just to say that i dont have an answer to that question except that youve got to find a way of doing it and find a way of a language in which to be in area which varies from place to place and what you can say in india as in africa is different from what you can say as a fellow muslim and theres a difference to what you can say as apassword , there are all these rules. Absolutely. And i think thats a much for me, i useful way of thinking about how to engage politically, sometimes people say you use your privilege but this seems to me to be something that is much more artful suggestion about sort of how does one navigate the world with an honesty about how youare situated. And also with an integrity viscvis people who are situateddifferently than you. And their autocrats, you know thats different from peoplelike myself. There are people who know that the world, the way to get the attention of the ruling class is to attack privacy so the light shines brightly but that brings danger with it to. Absolutely. One of the additional questions that someone asked us is about scapegoating in this moment. So they referenced what has happened in the United States with the way the virus is been used by the right wing as an occasion to stigmatize Asian Americans or we can look at china in the way its being used to stigmatize africans and sort of how to, obviously that is just a continuation of global practices of nationalism and ethnocentrism and various fundamentalisms but the question i guess is how to resist or how to engage people in ways to resist the other and as a way of responding to your area which is a huge lesson. But seems to be partially at the core of this. That is almost equal to the crisis of hunger in india and the crisis of stigmatization with muslims who are being called the colored jihad and human bombs and the spread of the disease and people have been attacked. Hospitals have said that you know, muslims will be evicted unless they have separate warts. There was today two days ago a woman who spoke of how she was sent into hospital, was beaten and then she was stormed, started to clean up and she lost her child. So that is a very big issue here in europe. What can we do accept stand up and keep speaking about it and writing about it. And putting all ourselves in the role of an telling a different story. Telling a different story. Theres a one of the things that i think i was surprised about after the two thousand 16 election here and i think its goes back to something we were just discussing earlier. Its there was a demobilization that happened and i think because they had been so much political organizing in the states and the previous years, there is an expectation i think for many of us that it would extend and amplify and in fact, there was this profound drop. And i didnt think it had something to do with what you were describing which is when what happens with the courts has happened. When there seems to be no place to appeal. For a remedy. Suddenly organizing and resistance feel much more dangerous. And hard to engage in repeatedly. And i, i guess i wanted to do that to a question that was raised about whether there are specific organizations or you know, people or places that for you, serve as a model, for how one sort of , models for thinking about how to engage politically. How to resist and collective to keep other institutions or groups that serve that function for you. The kind of inspiration. I think anybody who reads my sedition start will see that thats all that one has written about over the years. Theres so many, so much for me, i always say that my most profound morning came from the movement in india. Which has been decimated by area avenue. There have been over i want to say i spent time in the forest of india where the burma war, mostly waged by Indigenous People. Who organized themselves under the banner of the maoists but i didnt really know how maoists worked but that is one of the 50 percent of the armed fighters there. I learned a lot from them to. And so much. That was one of the things that i felt. Over the years i used to loudly say that one of indias best exports is dissent. How profoundly these movements and have been of globalization and what is meant to be. And anything that i write about is, it comes from collective wisdom. Groups that have come and gone, who have fought and who are fighting. You know, the destination of them is also somethingthat i have watched. So but when for example when the antimuslim citizenship law in december, just before that i had written a very long about this National Register which was happening in the state of some with 20 Million People not on the list or 20 Million People today, just in one state in , now theyre planning to do that exercise all over india and i was so sad about how silent the streets were suddenly may pass the law and it became law when they pass. The streets of india exploded and there was so much beauty in that. It was incredible, the students, the poets, their human. The women. It was just a display of such wonderful religion. And that is why now under the lockdown, all those who are seen as leaders are put away so that when the lockdown ends, this movement doesnt start up again. Because those laws are still and theyre just restrained around it. I want to stay with. But there seems to be this intersection of patriarchy and the lockdown and, you know, the militaristic metaphors and it to the person that was asking if you could speak to how you see patriarchy at work in this moment . It is extraordinary that coming from whatever studies that i have read about the violence it seems to be effecting men more than women and the consequences are going to be effecting women because this dramatic rise in Domestic Violence [inaudible] the fact that most of the frontline workers but [inaudible] who are going to be most vulnerable to it will be women and of course this is wrapped up in this language and so you know, in any crises, even when we were when i was talking about the [inaudible] movement, against so much displacement taken in india ultimately obviously the most Vulnerable People take the biggest hit. So part of what i was saying is how this virus exposes the illnesses, societal illnesses, along with exposing what happens [inaudible] it is extraordinary because this is an illness that demands care and to use a war metaphor, in the context of being a moment that requires the kind of work that is often seen as less important but is the most essential work to care for. One thing i think we should also say and this is not its a thought i had but perhaps this is the first pandemic that has taken place in this kind of connected, digitized era and therefore everyone panics and with half the information in corner information it is feeding into these huge policy which are not based on real evidence so you have these Expert Opinions which [inaudible] and i think that is pretty dangerous in this kind of amplification of panic and then every country needs to take a decision based on what the idea of the knockdown in some ways what it means in italy or what it means in india in the Prime Minister comes out and says everybody must go on to their balcony and bang their pots and pans because but in india you are talking about people who have balconies and [inaudible] its cutandpaste but comes from this sometimes i think its pandemic of panic. And connected with that the sources of our information are so often driven by profit motives so there is a way that panic is lucrative because it keeps us watching so that yeah. Thats interesting because on one hand we have, i think, we have a responsibility to be attending to the rest of the world and yet we do have to think about approaches and solutions that have a more meaningful conditions. Its just so important that [inaudible] in delhi i what i were called associatives and people turn to these little machines themselves and so they are snitching on each other and suspecting each other and then they suspect suspicion into the Police Machine and it becomes a very dangerous kind of society and weve been divided instead of not and i think the other thing is happening in some places but duty and parasite and in the place where it seems [inaudible] people should be careful of this in this way. Absolutely. This is a beautiful question which is about how you cultivate joy in the midst of all of this and sustain it. Well, see i dont think joy should be cultivated or sustained. [laughter] it is something which one has to know is [inaudible] because its something you i mean, except when they tell us we can only make it from an advertisement but otherwise it is something which i think the is very important to have [inaudible] and to recognize what it is that truly gives you joy and to know that you cant hold onto that. It comes and goes. Like i said, you, as a writer, especially as a fiction writer [inaudible] i actually just, i think, sometimes the modern world has been sold this idea that they are entitled to happiness but yet to be unafraid of feeling somehow is a powerful thing. Sometimes you need to resist but sometimes i think that perhaps because feelings and this is the work i do and what i write so they be that is what makes me see it because theres a world in which i can do something, you know, which helps me which doesnt break me even when the grief is a cute weather perhaps i didnt have that ability to write it i would not be saying these things but i dont know. But i think there is something very western and particularly american about the idea that you can evade discomfort or create a life without suffering which is oftentimes sort of a life of things distraction and there is that some degree of discomfort is unavoidable and that what you described that writing is living a life that has meaning which is different from happiness and is sustaining in its own way even if in its most painful moments. Look, i know and remember [inaudible] sometimes dangerous and sometimes very, very tense situations whether it was when we were walking through the field and going early in the morning to capture the downside and they were getting villagers and police are there and everyone is getting arrested or whether it was in a forest walking and you know, there is never an absence of humor or never an absence of even there is always for the struggle but even everything changes all the time. Its never just one thing and it keeps happening but there is always something ridiculous that happens in just [inaudible] so i think that is the part of traveling light and not wanting [inaudible] yeah, right. I think and i dont know if this is a term you would use so please correct me if i am wrong but one of the things that i deeply appreciate about the way you write is that you attended very carefully to a particular crossroads both in fiction and nonfiction and, its in such a way that i think of it as post ideological in the sense that it is not about the binaries of making sort of this argument for the organization and this illusion that is about what it means to be with other human beings and the planets and to do that in a way that is deeply respectful and loving at every level and i to think that is challenging for us at times as we try to think of how do we organize society but it feels as if you continue to ask the question well, what are we attempting and failing to attempt and how does that make us you know, make the future possible in one way or the other as opposed to lets place this model on the circumstance. I think what i write even in the nonfiction was informed by the fiction writer and the complicated and im indoctrinated of the fiction writers where its almost like i cant see myself having the similar feeling at every given point of time so its okay to fail and it is always complex of what is going on and to be aware as a person who studied architecture and design you are aware of the things that go into a particular moment or particular thing you look at and all the colors that go into ones garment instead of making it one color so its yes, i think that there is that but you tell a story and even my nonfiction is the telling of a story and whether you tell the story then you see everything around somehow. Are there particular writers or stories that you are returning to as you think through this moment two. Right now i just keep reading the [inaudible] and i just set it that there was this russian called [inaudible] in the first book of his head that i read was called [inaudible] and it was the Second World War but i found it incredible and then now the book that preceded it but was only recently that [inaudible] i was immersed in this universe just before of course [inaudible] so i think im reading people from another [inaudible] but somehow dissolving in another time but to see how complicated and what human beings went through and have been through where we are not the first group through whaf the earth was not something that was in such crisis earlier, i should think now. But the idea of oceans and the docs and wild keys with all stock in this dead rivers and these things, you know, difficult to [inaudible] while this pandemic is raging trump has been orders for the moon to be mined. Yeah. Its hard to even contemplate that idea. I want to thank you so much for both your peace and having this conversation and i am waiting with baited breath. Are there i guess, are there things that you would want to say to that we have not heard that the people from literally all across the globe who are witnessing this conversation you would want to think about or tend to . I just want to be fully repeat that this is a moment and we will be moving through a portal and there are people that are preparing the worst kind of solutions to the problems we are facing. Solutions that would deepen inequalities which would further wound the planet, which will increase [inaudible] we cannot agree to move under electronic surveillance, even at the cost of, you know, everyone has been through Health Crisis before and we been through the plague and we never agreed to have electronic handcrafts to move [inaudible] so for heaven sake do not agree to any of that. Absolutely. Thank you so much bread im so grateful for you and your work and it is wonderful to see you even under these difficult circumstances. I feel some hope in the midst of all of this into everyone watching i hope that you will share this conversation with your friends and stay posted for the mayday events that they are hosting as well and thank you for [inaudible] at such a delight to speak to you. Lucky to have been with you. Thank you. Booktv continues now on cspan2. Television for serious readers. Joining us now on booktv is author nick adams, his sixth book is just out pretty here it is, trump and churchill. Mr. Adams, what do President Trump and Winston Churchill have in common . Peter, great to be with you. Donald trump and Winston Churchill have a lot in common. At first brush when you look at you would not think that to be the case could one w