Welcome to Litsy!

#bookmail! The tagged is totally blame it on @Emilymdxn ‘s review.

I‘m taking 30+ books to the library sale tomorrow, so we‘ll just call this “restocking.” 🤫😂

#nonfictionnovember

Arundhati Roy is just a master. These essays taught me a lot about so many different ways of looking at India, particularly Hindu nationalism in the last few years and how the covid crisis has been impacted by economic and class discrimination. I also LOVED all her writing about language and what it means in India.
#nfn2020 @Clwojick +20, #bookspinbingo @TheAromaofBooks no. 24!

We can choose to walk through [the pandemic] dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through it lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

The crystalline essays in this collection are mostly adapted from lectures given between June 2018 and April 2020. Azadi—Freedom—is a rallying cry for social justice in the Indian subcontinent. May the humane, intelligent voice of Arundhati Roy challenge the murk of fascism and shine a light towards a better future.

Is fascism a kind of feeling—in the way anger, fear and love are feelings—that manifests itself in recognizable ways across cultures? Does a country fall into fascism the way a person falls in love? Or, more accurately, in hate? Has India fallen in hate?

(Author photo from internet)

The principles of equality are anathema to the caste system. It‘s not hard to see how the idea that some human beings are inherently superior or inferior to others by divine mandate slides easily into the fascist idea of a “master race.” To escape the tyranny of Brahminism over the centuries, millions of Dalits & people from other subjugated castes converted to Islam, Sikhism or Christianity. 👇

As India embraces majoritarian Hindu nationalism, which is a polite term for fascism, many liberals and even communists continue to be squeamish about using that term. This, notwithstanding the fact that RSS ideologues are openly worshipful of Hitler and Mussolini, and that Hitler has found his way onto the cover of an Indian school textbook about great world leaders, alongside Ghandi and Modi.

Today, 13 February 2020, marks the 193rd day of the Indian government‘s shutdown of the internet in Kashmir. After months of having no access to mobile data or broadband, now 7 million Kashmiris, who live under the densest military occupation in the world, have been allowed to view what is known as a white list—a handful of government-approved websites. […] It‘s the equivalent of giving a thirsty person water from an eyedropper.

“Reporters Without Borders say that India is the 5th most dangerous place for journalists in the world, ranked just above Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen & Mexico.”
Image:
https://m.huffingtonpost.in/entry/amnesty-international-india-halts-operations_i...

I had to throw the language of The God of Small Things off a very tall building. And then go down (using the stairs) to gather up the shattered pieces. So was born The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.