Questions Writers Love To Hear

From Sonali Kolhatkar's interview with Arundhati Roy:
Sonali Kolhatkar:
"It’s very refreshing for me to see a South Asian woman, a woman who looks like me, be the new superstar of the left. And you may reject that term, “superstar” but unfortunately, or fortunately, whether you like it or not, when you walk into a room today, you command an audience. And it’s the Noam Chomsky effect – when he walks into a room, he gets a standing ovation before he even says a few words. So on the one hand I’m ecstatic that it’s not just another straight white male with a fancy education. How do you deal with that and is it healthy for the left?"
You can almost hear Roy squirming.
The rest of the interview's pretty decent, though it's a jumbled version of her speech. It's fashionable these days in India to condemn Arundhati Roy without reading her, to dismiss her as just a demagogue, to sneer at the large audiences she commands. I'm no member of the Canonise Arundhati brigade, but I find that knee-jerk dismissal very revealing; she makes people uncomfortable, and that in my book means she's doing the job a writer's meant to do. Read her; then vent your disagreement, or your spleen, or whatever. But, hell, read her.
Here she is on 'Public Power in the Age of Empire':
"The thing to understand is that modern democracy is safely premised on an almost religious acceptance of the nation state. But corporate globalization is not. Liquid capital is not. So even though capital needs the coercive powers of the nation state to put down revolts in the servants’ quarters, this setup ensures that no individual nation can oppose corporate globalization on its own. Radical change cannot and will not be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people. By the public. A public who can link hands across national borders.
So when we speak of 'Public Power in the Age of Empire,' I hope it’s not presumptuous to assume that the only thing that is worth discussing seriously is the power of a dissenting public. A public which disagrees with the very concept of empire. A public which has set itself against incumbent power--international, national, regional or provincial governments and institutions that support and service empire."
And on the media:
"While governments hone the art of waiting out crisis, resistance movements are increasingly being ensnared in a vortex of crisis production, seeking to find ways of manufacturing them in easily consumable, spectator-friendly formats. Every self-respecting peoples’ movement, every 'issue' is expected to have its own hot air balloon in the sky advertising its brand and purpose. For this reason, starvation deaths are more effective advertisements for impoverishment than millions of malnourished people, who don’t quite make the cut. Dams are not newsworthy until the devastation they wreak makes good television (and by then, it’s too late)."
And on NGOs:
"In the long run, NGOs are accountable to their funders, not to the people they work among. They’re what botanists would call an indicator species. It’s almost as though the greater the devastation caused by neoliberalism, the greater the outbreak of NGOs. Nothing illustrates this more poignantly than the phenomenon of the U.S. preparing to invade a country and simultaneously readying NGOs to go in and clean up the devastation. In order make sure their funding is not jeopardized and that the governments of the countries they work in will allow them to function, NGOs have to present their work in a shallow framework, more or less shorn of a political or historical context. At any rate, an inconvenient historical or political context. Apolitical (and therefore, actually, extremely political) distress reports from poor countries and war zones eventually make the (dark) people of those (dark) countries seem like pathological victims. Another malnourished Indian, another starving Ethiopian, another Afghan refugee camp, another maimed Sudanese...in need of the white man’s help. They unwittingly reinforce racist stereotypes and reaffirm the achievements, the comforts and the compassion (the tough love) of Western civilization. They’re the secular missionaries of the modern world."