In India, whichever language you write in, the possibility of people not understanding irony or not understanding [remains there]. This as a writer is most terrifying!
There are things that you can't do - like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.
I do what I do, and write what I write, without calculating what is worth what and so on. Fortunately, I am not a banker or an accountant. I feel that there is a time when a political statement needs to be made and I make it.
Fiction is the most joyous, beautiful, sophisticated, wonderful thing in the world.
The [Booker] prize was actually responsible in many ways for my political activism. I won this thing and I was suddenly the darling of the new emerging Indian middle class – they needed a princess. They had the wrong woman. I had this light shining on me at the time, and I knew that I had the stage to say something about what was happening in my country. What is exciting about what I have done since is that writing has become a weapon, some kind of ammunition.
The World Trade Organization, The World Bank, The International Monetary Fund and other financial institutions virtually write economic policy and parliamentary legislation. With a deadly combination of arrogance and ruthlessness, they take their sledgehammers to fragile, interdependent, historically complex societies and devastate them, all under the fluttering banner of 'reform'.
It's OK just to be a writer, who writes about the society in which he lives and the issues that most important. Now how can that not be a writer, it always was. It's just recently that writers have been reduced to these playthings of the market.
I stand by what I write and follow through on what I write.
I've never been that person who thought that because I've written one novel, I should write another and another. It's only when there was another novel to write that I was going to write another.
People say to me, Oh, it's so wonderful that you're writing about real things, and that it's a political thing to do, and I say, look-to be in my position and not say anything is a hell of a political thing. You need to think politically, otherwise you'll be one of these people who says, Oh, this person's saying this and that person's saying that, and I'm confused. And I say, yeah, because you want to be confused.
In a way, writing is an incredible act of individualism, producing your language, and yet to use it from the heart of a crowd as opposed to as an individual performance is a conflicting thing. I do stand alone, and yet it's not about being an individual or being ambitious.
My writing is translated into every Indian language, it's distributed in pamphlets, in little private video things, it's everywhere. So it's a lovely pastime for the middle class to think of itself as the whole nation.
![In India, whichever language you write in, the possibility of people not understanding irony or not understanding [remains there]. This as a writer is most terrifying!](http://cdn.quoteddaily.com/images/arundhati-roy/in-india-whichever-language-you-write-in-the-possibility-of-people-not-understanding-irony-or-not-understanding-remains-there-this.jpg)
