"I feel as though I lack a skin" Arundhati Roy

"I feel as though I lack a skin—something that separates me from the world I live in. That absence of skin is dangerous. It invites trouble into every part of your life. It makes what is public private and what is private public. It can sometimes become very traumatic, not just for me but for those who are close to me."

Can we disavow Marx?

Well, these days I've been reading a lot of Jacques Derrida, the deconstructionist philosopher. One of his major works is Specters of Marx. What exactly is his reading of Karl Marx and Marxism? Derrida is not only a fine incisive analyst, he is also a brilliant writer - with great imagination and moral vision.

"Our hypothesis is that the same is true for Marx's spectrology. Is this not our own great problematic constellation of haunting? It has no certain border, but it blinks and sparkles behind the proper names of Marx, Freud, and Heidegger: Heidegger who misjudged Freud who misjudged Marx. This is no doubt not aleatory. Marx has not been received...Marx remains an immigrant chrez nous, a glorious, sacred, accursed but still a clandestine immigrant as he was all his life. He belongs to a time of disjunction, to that "time out of joint" in which is augerated, laboriously, painfully, tragically,a new thinking of borders, a new experience of the house, the home,and the economy. Between earth and sky. One should not rush to make of the clandestine an illegal alien or, what risks coming down to the same thing,to domesticate him. To neutralize him through naturalization.To assimilate him so as to stop frightening himself (making oneself fear) with him. He is not part of the family, but one should not send him back, once again, him too, to the border."
page 174.

Ian McEwan on Israel

"The question was Lenin's: what is to be done? Israel needs to harness the creativity of its writers, artists and scientists, and not retreat to a bunker mentality".

The most popular slogan in Tahrir Square

Ish-sha‘b/yu-rîd/is-qât/in-ni-zâm.” Rendered into English, it might read, “The people want the regime to fall”.

Arundhati Roy on Binayak Sen's life term

"The fact is that, it is not about one man. It is about hundreds of nameless people who are also in jail. It is not about misuse of law; it is about the very proper use of a very bad law. So, the problem is that we have to talk about the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), which is actually, barely constitutional".

Post-Egypt contemplation

Supposing,2,00,000 of our citizens march into Jantar Mantar demanding regime change or immediate redressal of their grievances, how will the Indian state respond?

Alaa Al Aswany on Egypt uprising

,It has been a unique experience not to read about history but to live inside history.

Assange on civil society

"It's not about saving the whales. It's about giving people the information they need to support whaling or not support whaling. That is the raw ingredients that is needed to make a just and civil society. And without that you're just sailing in the dark."