YouSaid · the spoken record

Arundhati Roy

lines on the record: 24
first: 2025-09-14
most recent: 2025-09-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Is called in which language does it rain, over torment its cities, which is a line from Neruda, but it's about language and translation and this constant process of translation that we are in certain countries like India. We live in so many languages simultaneously. I think that enriches One language can enrich another. But in that essay, I talk about how. Way before the subcontinent was partitioned into India and Pakistan, they partitioned language, Hindi and Urdu, Sanskritized, Persianized, you know, so language is a very political thing also there. And it's the only country where people want to reduce the vocabulary rather than expand it, which is such a self-defeating thing.”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, there's no doubt that the language I'm most fluent in and comfortable in is English. But, you know, in India we live in a sea of languages, you know, and so you're constantly dipping into other languages like Hindi or Malayalam. In my previous novel, the Ministry of Utmost Happiness, I almost said translated from the original by Arun Datiro. All the characters speak in different languages and they almost even translating for each other or to each other, which is how it is in India. In fact, see this scarf that I'm wearing, it's called a list of banned books on it. And I have to embroider the name of my own book, which was banned in India two weeks ago called Azadi. And the first essay in that book”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I don't feel like I cannot sit in moral judgment about anyone who chooses to leave because I understand it. And I also am not such a, my brain is not divided into countries. So I think you can... You can live wherever you like and fight, however you like, in all sorts of ways because I'm not a person of the flag, in fact, I think there's one thing where I say flags are just colored bits of cloth that they use to shrink, wrap your brains while you're alive. And then as a shroud to bury you when you're dead.”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a dilemma, and the people who leave also do suffer. You know, I have friends who have, you know, sometimes left not because they were scared, but because they were being hunted down in order to indict someone else or accuse someone else. And so they prefer to leave. And it's a very forlorn life. Fleeing as opposed to choosing to leave is of course a different thing. For me, I mean, again, that theory in my book, that the time when I feel most vulnerable, when I'm in India is when I'm about to finish a book and then suddenly this business starts of arrest her or whatever it goes on. I once did leave just to finish the Ministry of Atmos Happiness and I was devastated and within five days I went back.”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I don't know, I'm not so preachy and judgmental that I want to tell you you have a moral responsibility. But the dilemma between”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Quite a lot. And I think it has made me a very visual person. And then working in cinema enhanced that. I think how it influences my writing has a lot to do with the fact that anything that I write, the structure of it is as important as the language or the narrative. There's this slightly unorthodox way that I approach writing because it's almost like you design a building. You don't start at the entrance and end at the exit. So I write in this way where I'm just circling around something and moving things around is almost like designing a building or a city or a neighborhood or something when I write.”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in this book, there's a lot of, I mean, I discuss architecture to some extent and how I came to study architecture. I mean, one of the driving motives was that I knew that if I joined the School of Architecture, I would be able to start earning almost immediately by working in offices and doing stuff so that I could leave home, you know. But by the time I was in sort of fourth year, fifth year of architecture, I had become almost more interested in urban design and cities and how they came to be what they were and how they excluded and included people. I To see not just space, but politics through the study of architecture and urban space, you know? And also early on, an architect called Laurie Baker, who was just the most amazing person in terms of using local materials. So I think it formed my early personality.”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And on the day of the birthday, the optimist started opening his presence and grumbling and saying, oh, but this is not the brand I like. And he had a lot of complaints. And then they went to the optimist room and he was digging through the shint. They said, what are you doing? So he said, well, if there's so much shit, there must be a pony somewhere. It's like... I mean, who thought even just month before apartheid ended in South Africa, who thought it would end, you know? So it is, I mean, you do have to be unreasonable because if you're reasonable, then...”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the books, one of my books of essays was dedicated to those who have learnt to divorce hope from reason. You have to be unreasonable and hope. But I like this story about optimism and pessimism. There was a pair of twins and it was their birthday. And one twin was an optimist and one twin was a pessimist. So the parents gave the pessimist everything he wanted, his racing cycle, his iPad, his whatever particular sneakers, just filled his room with presents. And the optimist twin, they just filled his room with horse shit.”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Soviet Union or in Nazi Germany or people still wrote, people still thought, people still subverted. It just happened, you know. And now, you know, there was a time when people used to ask me, would you prefer to be in jail in India or in exile in the West? I said, now the question is, would you prefer to be jail in India or jail here? Because it's ridiculous what's happening here or what's happening in the US. Everything is suddenly become so dark even here.”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing is, of course, there's self-censorship. Even somebody like me, I self-censor all the time because I'm in a situation where I'm up for the big fight provided it's about a big text. But sometimes you're being threatened with terrible consequences for some arbitrary thing you might have said 12 years ago or something. And that's terrible. So then you become more and more careful, more and more careful. And you work In a dangerous situation, but then you think about History and the world, and how writers functioned in”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that moment is when they start expecting writers to be tour guides, you know? Showing sort of selling. Country, some great national pride thing you're supposed to wave the flag in every sentence. It is just So repulsive and so sad. So impossible for someone like me to do because when we fight, whether we fight against dams or nuclear or The hollowing out of institutions or everything, why do you fight? You fight because you love. You don't fight because you hate. So all the people that are in jail or accused of being anti-nationals are actually the ones that love, not love flags, but love and wish and dream to live in a better and more equal place. And the people who claim to be nationalists are the ones who send their children to America. So it's very odd situation. We were talking about self-censorship.”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then there is the, I mean, what's happening in India, what's happening in the US now happened to us in 2014. The attack on universities, the attack on citizenship, the attack on minorities, the attack on the economy by the Modi-led BJP government. And I often say that the January 6th coup attempted coup in America. In India, it succeeded, and those guys with antlers and furs actually rule us. And the danger now is that the violence is not coming just from the government, it's coming from the street, it's coming from majoritarianism. Thousands of people with swords coming out and saying Muslim women should be raped and Muslims should be killed and Hindu should be India should be a Hindu country or churches being burnt down and all of that and it's become almost normalized, you know?”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very interesting about silences because India, as many people know, Hindu society is castriden society where there are people, I mean one of the things I've often said is there's no such thing as the voiceless, there's only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard because there are stories that I mean, in fact Majority of people, if you look at the way Indian society functions, it is a society of apartheid. You have a tiny minority and I'm talking about a tiny minority of less than 10% that actually Takes up all the space, whether it's in the media, whether it's in the corporations. You know, all of it in Hindu society. So That kind of silencing is one very structural silencing that happens.”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A rough time I've had, or anything like that, but of allowing women, mothers and daughters some space, you know, like nobody can be perfect, you know, and sometimes I feel that in our culture in India, you know, the mother is deified provided she produces sons and adores them and behaves in the ways that society expects her to behave. Quite often in the West I sometimes have this feeling that as the feminist movement became strong through the back door came the demonization of the mother to kind of Undermine it in some ways. It was interesting to see whether you could actually write about this woman who was so contradictory in so many ways. She had such tremendous cruelty and yet such tremendous genius and such tremendous generosity.”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because she's like a, I'm going to say she's like an airport with no runways. You just have to keep the plane in the air. You know, you can't land. And you can't make up your mind, you know. It's almost like that, like when I wrote The God a Small Thing. Can you write the river? When I wrote the Ministry of What Must Happens, can you write the city? Can you write the mother who's not really interested that much about being a mother, but she has some other agenda, but she's so, you know, I mean, I just actually did it because I believed that this woman deserves a place in literature. Not as some complaint about.”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a screenplay, I would say exterior day river, but I wanted to spend pages describing that river. And it was almost like, and even in the non-fiction, I think you're always searching for a language for each thing that you write. When I started writing about big dams and what they do and irrigation and drainage, I was like, can I just write about this like you write about love or sex or romance? Can I write about irrigation? And can I make people read it? It's always a challenge to me the most exciting thing is the challenge of the writing itself, of the craft. Like even in this book, Can I write this woman? Can I communicate to you that you cannot have an opinion about her?”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As I mentioned in the reading, was trained as an architect. Then I worked in cinema, so I wrote screenplays and when I started writing the God of Small Things, it was almost like I wanted to write what I've often said stubbornly visual but unfilmable book. And the idea was...”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's also, it was also, I mean, actually in that chapter, I talk about what he taught me about. No, I mean, he was in some ways a great influence on me because when I was very small, it was my birthday or something and everyone would give me this random advice about studying hard and all that. And he showed me a little bauble, some rubbish. And he said, would you like this? And I said, yes. He said, I'll give it to you if you fail. I started thinking a lot about failure, you know, and then I realized that successful people who strut around and use up all the oxygen are not my favorite people. And between him and my father I learned a lot about The charm of people like them. And it was all kinds of very interesting and unconventional lessons that I learned as I walked along.”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He looked at him and says, You know, Mr. Talib, the Syrian Christians are a very diverse community. We have the Syrian Catholics, we have the Syrian Protestants, we have the Kana, we have the Yacobites, we have the Church of South India, we have the Pentecostals, we all have different churches. We don't agree with each other about anything. But if you question them closely, Find that there's one thing that they all agree about, and that is that Mr. Isaac is not a leader of the community. So, you know, they were also crazy, all of them, you know. So it's like not just my humor, it's just reportage on my part.”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Someone came from Delhi to make a documentary film about this, and he had no idea. You know, he thought he was coming to the small town to sort of patronize these small town Hicks. And so I went with him to the pickle factory, and my uncle came out and the whole thing was set up, the camera and all that. And the journalist from Delhi. Said, you know, Mr. Isaac, as a leader of the Syrian Christian community, could you tell us your views on the Syrian Christian inheritance law?”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a part in it where, so my mother's rivalry on this inheritance law was between my mother and her older brother, G. Isaac, whose name. And then he used to run a pickle factory. She used to run the school. So the little town was the war between the Pickle Factory and the school. And Isaac was actually a Rhodes scholar and so on, but he had given up everything. He'd become a communist and he started this pickle factory and he ran it to the ground. But I loved him. So I was in Kerala when this, my mother had won the case and she was being celebrated as this feminist icon and so on.”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So much despair, but at the same time, you know, there isn't a moment or a day in India when I don't just burst out laughing at something on the street or something, something that's going on is so unpredictable. And in the book, I think Humor I mean, sometimes the humor isn't necessarily mine, it's the characters, you know.”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just like in Turkey, I mean humor sometimes is all we have, you know, all we have to hold on to. You know, similarly in India there was a joke about in some Place called Sabzi Mandi, which is the vegetable wholesale market. Constable Came to his senior, the station house officer, and he said in Hindi Osama bin Laden Pakarga, meaning like I've arrested Osama bin Laden. So the guy went out and saw some poor man who was, you know, he says, what shit are you talking? How is this Osama bin Laden? He says, but he'll confess. He's like, we can make him confess to it. So there's so much cruelty in that society. And also...”
2025-09-14 · Intelligence Squared · Arundhati Roy on Storytelling, Memory and The Human Condition (Part Two) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT