Essays
Quotes from Arundhati Roy's Azadi
Interesting parallel between the pandemic and the idea of a portal:
- https://archive.org/details/azadi-by-arundhati-roy/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater
"in this time, as the Corona pandemic bums through us, our world is passing through a portal. We have journeyed to a place from which it looks unlikely that we can return, at least not without some kind of serious rupture with the past—social, political, economic, and ideological."
"Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it."
- https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca
