To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being absent from it, from being written out of it altogether… - Arundhati Roy

Normalcy was declared. (Normalcy was always a declaration.)

The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains.

Big Dams are to a nation's 'development' what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal. They're both weapons of mass destruction. They're both weapons governments use to control their own people. Both twentieth-century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They're both malignant indications of a civilization turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link -- the understanding-- between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life, and the earth to human existence.