A Quote by Arundhati Roy
As a woman who grew up in a village in India, I've spent my whole life fighting tradition. There's no way that I want to be a traditional Indian housewife.
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Many people who attack me know so little of that larger Tradition, and end up being not very traditional at all. When you invoke the whole and great Tradition, you end up scaring people who call 1950 America "traditional" Christianity. It is just what they are used to in their one limited lifetime.
I was brought up telling stories, when I was a kid, in the tiny village where I grew up. Storytelling was a tradition.
Indira Gandhi had been this very powerful, dominating, ambiguous mother figure. Ambiguous because she was tyrannical, she had imposed...she had suspended Indian democracy for a few years but she also was the woman who had defeated Pakistan in war at a time when most male politicians in India had secretly feared fighting that war, so that here in India even today Indira Gandhi is called by Indian nationalists the only man ever to have governed India.
I want some help on this. I'm being very honest, i want some ideas, as somebody who was arrested 50 years ago fighting for Civil Rights trying to desegregate schools in Chicago, who spent his whole life fighting against racism, I want your ideas. What do you think we can do? What can we do?
I have an Indian father, and when you grow up in a house with an Indian father, culturally, that's what becomes dominant in the house. So that's the tradition we grew up with.
The culinary tradition in my family is very strong. My mother, a very wise woman, spent the better part of her life in a kitchen. It's a very strong part of her identity. I grew up there next to the fire.
I've been interested in dreams myself for a long time, and it's a big part of the Indian tradition, especially where I was brought up in Calcutta in my family, which is quite traditional.
I basically love classical music. I love a lot of musicians playing together and the whole culture of that whether it's Indian or it's Western. But in India, I think it's limited to filler music unfortunately. That's one thing I want to push in India where we have the infrastructure of an orchestra where you play Indian melodies with an orchestra and something different for a universal audience. It requires a lot of work from me.
I'm not saying a housewife is in any way inferior to a workingwoman. No, she isn't. But as an activist, as a woman, I would say the choice of being a housewife or pursuing a career should be left entirely to the woman and that choice should be respected.
In the village where I grew up, a lot of girls didn't have a choice of whether to go to middle school. They would get engaged or married and spend their entire life in that village.
I grew up in an era where you had to find your own way as a woman. When I was a kid, there was this whole physical and emotional neatness and purity that a woman was supposed to have, and I didn't fit into that.
If anyone thinks Indian Muslims will dance to their tune, they are delusional. Indian Muslims will live for India. They will die for India. They will not want anything bad for India.
I grew up in Sierra Leone, in a small village where as a boy my imagination was sparked by the oral tradition of storytelling. At a very young age I learned the importance of telling stories - I saw that stories are the most potent way of seeing anything we encounter in our lives, and how we can deal with living.
When I grew up, I realised what an amazing thing my parents did. It was such a big deal for my mom, a middle class woman, to decide to leave her children and husband to go and do her Ph.D. for three years. And my dad, who is even more middle class, a traditional South Indian, to let his wife do that.
My being Indian is possibly the biggest thing that influences my stories. Not just in terms of settings - most of the settings in my stories are Indian - but also in terms of characters and plot. I think growing up in India grew my imagination in certain ways that would not have happened in any other place. I'm also fascinated by the idea of India, and writing stories allows me to explore this. As for thematic elements, they are probably pretty obvious in my stories. I also hope that my stories bust stereotypes at least to a modest extent.
I grew up on the beach and I grew up surfing and I grew up swimming in this very genuine beach town back in Australia, and it's just something I really want to reflect in my lifestyle and in the way I am, the way I represent myself, the way I dress and the music that I make.
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