>FYI/Joanna
>
>It's funny, I liked "The God of Small Things," but I like her political
>writing about ten times more.
>
>Joanna
>________________________________________
>
>Under The Nuclear Shadow
>
>by Arundhati Roy
>Dissident Voice
>June 02, 2002
>
>SOUTH ASIA
>
>This week as diplomats' families and tourists quickly disappeared,
>journalists from Europe and America arrived in droves. Most of them stay
>at the Imperial Hotel in Delhi. Many of them call me. Why are you still
>here, they ask, why haven't you left the city? Isn't nuclear war a real
>possibility? It is, but where shall I go? If I go away and everything
>and every one, every friend, every tree, every home, every dog, squirrel
>and bird that I have known and loved is incinerated, how shall I live
>on? Who shall I love, and who will love me back? Which society will
>welcome me and allow me to be the hooligan I am, here, at home?
>
>We've decided we're all staying. We've huddled together, we realize how
>much we love each other and we think what a shame it would be to die
>now. Life's normal, only because the macabre has become normal. While we
>wait for rain, for football, for justice, on TV the old generals and the
>eager boy anchors talk of first strike and second strike capability, as
>though they're discussing a family board game. My friends and I discuss
>Prophecy, the film of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dead
>bodies choking the river, the living stripped of their skin and hair, we
>remember especially the man who just melted into the steps of the
>building and we imagine ourselves like that, as stains on staircases.
>
>My husband's writing a book about trees. He has a section on how figs
>are pollinated, each fig by its own specialized fig wasp. There are
>nearly 1,000 different species of fig wasps. All the fig wasps will be
>nuked, and my husband and his book.
>
>A dear friend, who is an activist in the anti-dam movement in the
>Narmanda Valley, is on indefinite hunger strike. Today is the twelfth
>day of her fast. She and the others fasting with her are weakening
>quickly. They are protesting because the government is bulldozing
>schools, felling forests, uprooting hand pumps, forcing people from
>their villages. What an act of faith and hope. But to a government
>comfortable with the notion of a wasted world, what's a wasted value?
>
>Terrorists have the power to trigger a nuclear war. Non-violence is
>treated with contempt. Displacement, dispossession, starvation, poverty,
>disease, these are all just funny comic strip items now. Meanwhile,
>emissaries of the coalition against terror come and go preaching
>restraint. Tony Blair arrives to preach peace -- and on the side, to
>sell weapons to both India and Pakistan. The last question every
>visiting journalist always asks me: "Are you writing another book?"
>
>That question mocks me. Another book? Right now when it looks as though
>all the music, the art, the architecture, the literature, the whole of
>human civilization means nothing to the monsters who run the world. What
>kind of book should I write? For now, just for now, for just a while
>pointlessness is my biggest enemy. That's what nuclear bombs do, whether
>they're used or not. They violate everything that is humane, they alter
>the meaning of life.
>
>Why do we tolerate them? Why do we tolerate the men who use nuclear
>weapons to blackmail the entire human race?
>
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