All My Friends Are Fictional’s Reviews > My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction > Status Update

As symbols of countries, flags are powerful objects, worthy of contemplation. […] The earth is 4.5 billion years old. […] What we call “human civilization” is just a few thousand years old. India as a country with its present borders is less than 80 years old. Clearly, we could do with a little perspective.
Worship a flag? My soul is either too modern or too ancient for that.
I’m not sure which.
Maybe both.

“Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create a market for weapons? After all, the economies of Europe, the United States, and Israel depend hugely on their weapons industry. It’s the one thing they haven’t outsourced to China.
In the the new Cold War between the United States and China, India is being groomed to play the role Pakistan
played as a US ally in the Cold War with Russia.”

When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burka rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it’s not about liberating her but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism. Coercing a woman out of her burka is as bad as coercing her into one. It’s not about the burka. It’s about the coercion.

“The transformation of the idea of justice into the industry of human rights has been a conceptual coup in which NGOs and foundations have played a crucial part. The narrow focus of human rights enables an atrocity-based analysis in which the larger picture can be blocked out and both parties in a conflict […] — can both be admonished as Human Rights Violators.”

“To digitize a country with such a large population of the illegitimate and “illegible”—people who are for the most part slum dwellers, hawkers, Adivasis without land records—will criminalize them, turning them from illegitimate to illegal. […] as though a lack of information is the cause of world hunger, and not colonialism, debt, and skewed profit-oriented corporate policy.”

“To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past, but who may really be the guides to our future. To do this, we have to ask our rulers: Can you leave the water in the rivers? The trees in the forest? […] If they say they cannot, then perhaps they should stop preaching morality to the victims of their wars.”

“The first step toward reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who
have a different imagination — an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination that has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment.”

“If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings. It lives low, down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains, and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains, and the rivers protect them.”

“The day capitalism is forced to tolerate noncapitalist societies in its midst and to acknowledge limits in its quest for domination, the day it is forced to recognize that its supply of raw material will not be endless is the day when change will come. If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings.”

“For them [Russia and China], too, the ability to consume has become the yardstick by which progress is measured. For this kind of “progress” you need industry. To feed the industry you need a steady supply of raw material. For that you need mines, dams, domination, colonies, war. Old powers are waning, new ones rising. Same story, different characters — rich countries plundering poor ones.”