But it’s hard to say where experience ends and imagination begins. The story is by no means a true story. But the feelings in it are. - Arundhati Roy

I love the unanswered question, the unresolved story, the unclimbed mountain, the tender shard of an incomplete dream. Most of the time. But is it mandatory for a writer to be ambiguous about everything? Isn't it true that there have been fearful episodes in human history when prudence and discretion would have just been euphemisms for pusillanimity? When caution was actually cowardice? When sophistication was disguised decadence? When circumspection was really a kind of espousal? Isn't it true, or at least theoretically possible, that there are times in the life of a people or a nation when the political climate demands that we — even the most sophisticated of us — overtly take sides? I think such times are upon us.

When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the “Nation,” it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry.

Well.. for so many years, people—let's say in India—have been fighting this very idea of progress, of infinite growth, of this form of development which has resulted now in what we call jobless growth, what everybody knows to be the case. You have nine individuals who own the same amount of wealth as the bottom 500 million. This is what infinite growth has led to—infinite growth for some people. So this idea that you will never question your idea of progress, you will never question the comfort of the Global North. And by Global North—now and the elite South, and the downtrodden North, you know? Years ago, I wrote an essay which ended by saying, “Can we leave the bauxite in the mountain?”...Can you look at the mountain and not just calculate its mineral worth? Can you understand that a mountain has much more than just the value of the minerals in it? And there is—it's a civilizational issue, right? That for people who have lived there, have known that mountain, they know it sustains not just the people. It's not just a question of who is getting displaced. But how does, for example, that bauxite mountain—which stores water and waters the plains all around it, which grows the food, which sustains a whole population—but it's meant for a corporation that is given the mining contract. It's just, how much does that bauxite cost? Can we store it and trade it on the futures market?