Someone who sees out of my 8 blog images, only the one disdainful of “Pakistan” and not the ones disdainful of Advani, Mithunda, Thackeray, Salman Khan, SRK, Amar Singh, Shakti Kapoor, Mandira Bedi, Jyoti Basu, Mamata Banerjee and many others betrays the strongest possible form of fundamentalism-driven tunnel vision. Better luck next time !

All “convented” children should come with a warning attached: “ability to write English like a white person is no guarantee of actual brains.”

She needs to be ridiculed like the buffoon she is, like old man Thackeray in this respect. Except that it is a lot safer to lampoon Arundhati, she doesn’t have goon squads guarding her ghairat like that old vicious fool.

Secondly, any activist can be accused of being an attention-seeker. Anyone who stands up for a particular view you don’t agree with can be called a fundamentalist. You kinda need to be careful while calling people fundamentalist lest you bundle the crazies who want to kill you for your views with genuinely concerned dissenters who simply disagree with your views.

Thirdly, while I don’t agree with many of her views, to put her thoughts about Maoists in perspective, I suggest any of the pieces by P.Sainath or his book, “Everybody Loves a Good Drought”. He is not a Commie apologist but a respected rural affairs expert who highlights the complete breakdown of any semblance of State authority in such impoverished regions. Where present, State authority is tyrannous rather than helpful.

Then again, one has to remind oneself that its easy for us cocky young laptop wielding bloggers, who sitting in a CCD or Barrista with an Irish Coffee and a Wifi connection, to dole out wisps of our insights on such matters, hoping that commenting on such names as Roy’s would give their blog a more intellectual dimension to an otherwise collection of wry potshots at the aforementioned Rakhi Sawant, all the while pretending that rural India with its impoverished and brutalised denizens are all an elaborate concoction of ‘Ms. Roy’.