Month: July 2009

The London Literature Festival 2009 opened on 2 July at the Southbank Centre, with Arundhati Roy, introducing her new book Listening to grasshoppers: field notes on democracy. Introduced by Shami Chakrabarti from civil rights group Liberty, Arundhati spoke to a packed auditorium.

She attacked the idea that India is the ‘biggest democracy’ in the world and explained how the poor are left out of development. The poor have been robbed of the language of fight back, with terms such as ‘progress’, ‘unity’ and ‘democracy’ used by the establishment when attacking rights. She has called this a “language heist”. read more