An old-growth forest, a mountain range or a river valley is more important and certainly more loveable than any country will ever be.

Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things one could get used to.

States have invested themselves with the right to legitimise violence - so who gets criminalised and delegitimised? Only - or well that's excessive - usually, the resistance.

Fiction is the most joyous, beautiful, sophisticated, wonderful thing in the world.

If you look at Indian society, it's a society made up of minorities. There's nobody who's not a minority, whether it's ethnicity, caste or religion. But the whole effort now is to confect a political constituency - an ethnic or a religious constituency that can coalesce into a political majority in order to deal with this model of representative democracy. That process has been a hundred years in the making in this part of the world.

Perhaps it's true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house---the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture---must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstitutred. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.

To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination.