by Esther Kaplan
She arrived in the U.S. From India with her parents when she was just a little kid—long before she took the name Warcry or started protesting institutions like the World Economic Forum. It was 1976, the bicentennial, and right off her dad bought her a small American flag. She says he saw America as a land of promise, but she watched him work hard as a researcher every day of his life only to die young. "I don't want to live my whole life for the system," she says. At college in the Bay Area, she read Emma Goldman for the first time, and "it was like someone threw open a window in my brain. Fresh air rushed in and I never went back." She got her direct action chops tree-sitting in old growth forests—and then came Seattle, and the chance to take on the "corporate death machine" itself.
In an activist video about that now famous protest against the World Trade Organization, there's a shot of Warcry, a black scarf masking all but her radiant eyes, shouting giddily, "I always wanted to be part of a revolution!" Yet this same Warcry has kept that little flag all these years, and still feels an affinity for her dad's struggles and hopes. "The American dream is dead," she says. "But there are certain American ideals—freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to dissent—these are things I believe in and would like to make real."
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0205/kaplan.php