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Three-quarters of India lives on the edge of the market economy. You can't tell them that only those who can afford water can have it.

Arundhati Roy

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Arundhati Roy
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 24
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Suzanna Arundhati Roy
Three
Edge
Edges
Market
India
Economy
Water
Lives
Quarters
Tell
Afford

More quotes by Arundhati Roy

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I think it was 50 million people across the world who marched against the war in Iraq. It was perhaps the biggest display of public morality in the world - you know, I mean, before the war happened. Before the war happened, everybody knew that they were being fed lies.
Arundhati Roy
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I'm not ambitious. I don't want to get anywhere, I don't want anything more. I sometimes think that for me that is the real freedom, that I don't want anything. I don't want money or prizes. I want people to know that a war is going to be fought.
Arundhati Roy
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With one hand, you're selling the country out to Western multinationals. And with the other, you want to defend your borders with nuclear bombs. It's such an irony! You're saying that the world is a global village, but then you want to spend crores of rupees on building nuclear weapons.
Arundhati Roy
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You have come to a stage where you almost have to work on yourself. You know, on finding some tranquility with which to respond to these things, because I realize that the biggest risk that many of us run is beginning to get inured to the horrors.
Arundhati Roy
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The NGO-ization of politics threatens to turn resistance into a well-mannered, reasonable, salaried, 9-to-5 job. With a few perks thrown in. Real resistance has real consequences. And no salary.
Arundhati Roy
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People who promote the free market and growth are far more romantic, and far more ideologically driven and blinded by their vision than somebody who goes in and comments about the beauty of a forest or the stars in the sky.
Arundhati Roy
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When I'm outside the cities I do feel optimistic. There is such grandeur in India and so much beauty.
Arundhati Roy
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Every strategy for real social change - land reform, education, public health, the equitable distribution of natural resources ... - has been cleverly, cunningly, and consistently scuttled and rendered ineffectual by those castes and that class of people which has a stranglehold on the political process.
Arundhati Roy
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The IMF and the World Bank, the most opaque and secretive entities, put millions into NGOs who fight against corruption and for transparency. They want the Rule of Law - as long as they make the laws. They want transparency in order to standardise a situation, so that global capital can flow without any impediment.
Arundhati Roy
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At some stage, as the water tables are dropping and the minerals that remain in the mountains are being taken out, we are going to confront a crisis from which we cannot return. The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution.
Arundhati Roy
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As a woman who grew up in a village in India, I've spent my whole life fighting tradition. There's no way that I want to be a traditional Indian housewife.
Arundhati Roy
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It's being made out that the whole point of the war was to topple the Taliban regime and liberate Afghan women from their burqas, we are being asked to believe that the U.S. marines are actually on a feminist mission.
Arundhati Roy
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Thousands are losing their jobs and homes, while corporations are being bailed out with billions of dollars.
Arundhati Roy
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In India, 100 of the richest people own assets worth 25% of the gross domestic product. There's something terribly wrong. No individual and no corporation should be allowed to amass that kind of unlimited wealth, including bestselling writers like myself, who are showered with royalties.
Arundhati Roy
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Dams are the temples of secular India and almost worshipped. They are huge, wet cement flags that wave in our minds. They're the symbol of nationalism to many.
Arundhati Roy
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In India, whichever language you write in, the possibility of people not understanding irony or not understanding [remains there]. This as a writer is most terrifying!
Arundhati Roy
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One of the reasons some people get so angry with me is because I have the space now that a lot of others who think like me don't.
Arundhati Roy
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Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease.
Arundhati Roy
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He walked on water. Perhaps. But could he have *swum* on land? In matching knickers and dark glasses? With his Fountain in a Love-in-Tokyo? In pointy shoes and a puff? Would he have had the imagination?
Arundhati Roy
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It was a grand old house, the Ayemenem House, but aloof-looking. As though it had little to do with the people who lived in it. Like an old man with rheumy eyes watching children play, seeing only transience in their shrill elation and their whole-hearted commitment to life.
Arundhati Roy