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nh1 's review for:
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
by Arundhati Roy
This story is about a lot of things but mostly it's about what happens when people are squeezed into spaces that are not large enough to contain human multitudes.
"The irony was -- is -- that if you put four Kashmiris in a room and ask them to specify what exactly they mean by Azadi, what exactly are its ideological and geographic contours, they would probably end up slicing each other's throats. And yet it would be a mistake to chalk this down to confusion. Their problem is not confusion, not really. It's more like a terrible clarity that exists outside the language of modern geopolitics. All the protagonists on all sides of the conflict, especially us, exploited this fault line mercilessly. It made for a perfect war -- a war that can never be won or lost, a war without end."
"By the time they got back, the lights were all out and everybody was asleep. Everybody, that is, except for Guih Kyom the dung beetle. He was wide awake and on duty, lying on his back with his legs in the air to save the world in case the heavens fell. But even he knew things would turn out all right in the end. They would, because they had to."
"The irony was -- is -- that if you put four Kashmiris in a room and ask them to specify what exactly they mean by Azadi, what exactly are its ideological and geographic contours, they would probably end up slicing each other's throats. And yet it would be a mistake to chalk this down to confusion. Their problem is not confusion, not really. It's more like a terrible clarity that exists outside the language of modern geopolitics. All the protagonists on all sides of the conflict, especially us, exploited this fault line mercilessly. It made for a perfect war -- a war that can never be won or lost, a war without end."
"By the time they got back, the lights were all out and everybody was asleep. Everybody, that is, except for Guih Kyom the dung beetle. He was wide awake and on duty, lying on his back with his legs in the air to save the world in case the heavens fell. But even he knew things would turn out all right in the end. They would, because they had to."