In a country like India, the British were only able to rule the country because it had completely co-opted the elite of the country, who did their work for them.

Our tragedy today is not just that millions of people who called themselves communist or socialist were physically liquidated in Vietnam, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, not just that China and Russia, after all that revolution, have become capitalist economies, not just that the working class has been ruined in the United States and its unions dismantled, not just that Greece has been brought to its knees, or that Cuba will soon be assimilated into the free market - it is also that the language of the Left, the discourse of the Left, has been marginalised and is sought to be eradicated.

America is like some crazed, bewildered, rich giant bumbling around in a poor area with his pockets stuffed with money, and lots of weapons - just throwing stuff around.

India lives in several centuries at the same time. Every night outside my house I pass a road gang of emaciated laborers digging a trench to lay fiber optic cables to speed up digital revolution. They work by the light of a few candles.

Use your art to fight.

In 2001, we were told that the war in Afghanistan was a feminist mission. The marines were liberating Afghan women from the Taliban. Can you really bomb feminism into a country? And now, after 25 years of brutal war - 10 years against the Soviet occupation, 15 years of US occupation - the Taliban is riding back to Kabul and will soon be back to doing business with the United States.

Every time I say the word capitalism, everyone just assumes I have plenty of Marxism in me, I do. But Russia and China had their bloody revolutions and even while they were Communist, they had the same idea about generating wealth - tear it out of the bowels of the earth. And now they have come out with the same idea in the end... you know, capitalism. But capitalism will fail, too.