My book review in The National newspaper: Twenty years is a long time to wait for new writing but in the case of Indian writer Arundhati Roy she’s remained deeply engaged with her country over the last two decades. After the huge success of her first novel, The God of Small Things won the Man…
Showing all posts tagged India
Why literary festivals matter
My weekly Guardian column: The Byron Bay writers’ festival, one of Australia’s largest literary events, has just finished after three days of discussion and debate under sunshine and rain. With… record-breaking… crowds listening to writers and rappers in large outdoor tents, it was impossible not to be seduced by the diverse participants, including British authors… Jeanette Winterson… and… Geoff Dyer.…
News flash: Afghan war about India and Pakistan
The kind of perspective far too rarely heard in the West; William Dalrymple writes in the Guardian with an extract from his recent paper,… A Deadly Triangle: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India: The hostility between India and Pakistan, ongoing for more than 60 years, lies at the heart of the current war in Afghanistan. Most observers in…
The new totalitarianism in India
The always eloquent Arundhati Roy on disaster capitalism in the world’s biggest quasi-democracy: I don’t know how far back in history to begin, so I’ll lay the milestone down in the recent past. I’ll start in the early 1990s, not long after capitalism won its war against Soviet Communism in the bleak mountains of Afghanistan.…
Israeli export: lessons in isolation
The Jerusalem Post reports on the latest lessons the Zionist state are giving the world. What inspiration: A growing number of countries are flocking to Israel to study border security as the Defense Ministry works to complete the construction of a physical and technological barrier along the Egyptian border. In August, a delegation from India…
The Indian view of online revolutions
Here’s another (mostly) positive Indian review of my recently released edition of The Blogging Revolution (previous Indian reviews here). This one is by Anuradha Goyal: An Australian Jew goes around five non-democratic countries, 3 in middle east – Iran, Syria, Egypt and two others: China & Cuba, talks to limited people connected on the internet…
Indian embrace of The Blogging Revolution
My book The Blogging Revolution was released recently in an Indian edition. It’s been receiving positive reviews (including this one in Calcutta’s Telegraph). Here’s another one in The Tribune by Abhishek Joshi: The Blogging Revolution by Australian freelance journalist Antony Loewenstein is a striking account of the writer’s investigation of the web’s role in repressive…
Another mining company that isn’t helping people prosper
Early this year I visited Papua New Guinea to investigate the exploitation of resources by Western multinationals under the guise of development. Tragically, similar things are happening across the world, often away from the mainstream media’s gaza. Bianca Jagger travelled to India and found this: When I arrived at Biju Patnaik Airport, Bhubaneswar, Orissa, I…
If India is the future, worry about its 1%
India is often heralded as the great hope of the democratic state in the 21st century. Let the wonderful Arundhati Roy, writing in Outlook, show you otherwise: Is it a house or a home? A temple to the new India, or a warehouse for its ghosts? Ever since Antilla arrived on Altamont Road in Mumbai,…