STRIKE a conversation about Arundhati Roy and you are almost certain to evoke reactions ranging from the furrowed brow to the fuming larynx. The perplexing thing about this goddess of small beings is that even kurta - clad, Left- leaning progressives — her ‘type’ of people basically — loathe her just about as much as a knicker wallah or a Banana Republic patron. Listening to Grasshoppers, her latest collection of subversive writings, tells you why.
The book is sub- titled Field Notes on Democracy, but that isn’t strictly what it is. The ten essays, one short play and a brief fictional piece contained here were written at various times of domestic and international turbulence over the past seven years. They deal with a range of topics that don’t exactly segue from one to the other.
You get to smell Roy’s nausea from the 2002 riots of Gujarat, hear her impassioned plea for those incarcerated in the Parliament attack case, touch the pulse of Istanbul in the wake of Hrant Dink’s assassination, taste the morbidity of President George W. Bush’s visit to India and see the utter pointlessness of our rhetoric- laced reaction to last year’s Mumbai attack.
Her targets are the government, the police, the judiciary and the media — particularly the media.
All along these writings, there is a sixth sense of a deeper malaise, an intuition of a more fundamental fault with the way things are.
This sense is given sensibility in her astutely powerful introduction to the anthology.
http://newageislam.com/why-democracy-isnt-about-vote-margins/books-and-documents/d/1608
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