"The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest place. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never forget."
"Thanks to us, independence came (and went), elections come and go, but there has been no shuffling of the deck. On the contrary, the old order has been consecrated, the rift fortified. We, the Rulers, won't pause to look up from our heaving table. We don't seem to know the resources we are feasting on are finite and rapidly depleting. There is cash in the bank, but soon there'll be nothing left to buy with it. The food's running out in the kitchen. And the servants haven't eaten yet. Actually, the servants stopped eating a long time ago."
"Who knows, perhaps that is what the twenty-first century has in store for us. The dismantling of big bombs, big dams, big ideologies, big contradictions, big countries, big wars, big heroes, big mistakes. Perhaps it will be the century of the small. Perhaps right now, this very minute, there's a small god up in heaven readying herself for us."
Arundhati Roy
This text is a part of the several essays published by Pearl Jam's official fan club Ten Club in their Manual For Free Living Vol. 19
About the author: Suzanna Arundhati Roy, born on 24 November, 1961 is the author of the internationally acclaimed novel God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize on 14 October, 1997 a little more than five months after it was published. She grew up with little formal education and a lot of social activism around her. At 16, she lived in a squatters' camp in Delhi, making a living by selling empty beer bottles. Later, Arundhati Roy graduated in Architecture but eventually settled down as a writer and an activist.
