Monday, November 01, 2004
Public Power in the Age of Empire - Arundhati Roy
When she writes, prose looks and sounds like poetry. Using the best possible combination of the right words to express the exact meaning of a complex concept comes naturally to her. The way she brings down high brow topics to a layman’s level of understanding with the help of her command over the English language is amazing. But no thoroughly researched and detailed work will never achieve the status of ‘greatness’ unless it is backed up with the author’s passion about the same. And when it comes down to passionately espousing a cause, Arundhati Roy stands tall among the world’s best writers.
I first met her in the pages of “The God of Small Things” that was her debut and was staggered by her writing. I was immediately taken in by her lyrical flow of words that alternately reminded me of the sound of a torrential waterfall and that of a quiet stream. In all the reviews of this monumental debut, the acclaim by John Updike stands out: "A novel of real ambition must invent its own language, and this one does.....". All said and done, this fictional work deserves to be amongst the top ten books of 90’s and I strongly advocate it as a must-read for a lover of fiction. After this debut, quite contrary to what one would expect from a Booker winner, she branched off into writing about critical non-fictional causes that were and are still troubling the world.
Starting off with her ground breaking essay “The End Of Imagination”, she has come a long way in her career with a Tihar jail stint thrown in the middle. One of my three favorite Indian authors, the other two being ‘R.K.Narayan’ & ‘Amitav Ghosh’, she recently delivered a public address at California; the text of that public address was the cover story for Frontline’s previous issue. She elaborates her thought process in answering a question ‘What are the avenues and strategies of protest available to people who wish to resist the crisis of modern democracy ’ that is needless to say, exceptional.
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