Before introduce Arundhati Roy, i want to tantillo business. I want to thank the organizers sponsor of this teaching, haymarket books. Haymarket is a publisher of a number of books including the absolutely extraordinary collection of nonfiction essays written over 20 years. My seditious heart and a fourth coming book, azadi freedom. Fascism. Fiction which concludes with the essay, the pandemic is the portal which is the title of an foundation for our conversation today. Haymarket also publishes other critical radical thinkers such as angela davis, naomi klein, and so many others. In this moment in which we are reckoning with crises, with suffering, with deep injustice, its especially important for us to support critical thinkers, freedom fighters, and as part of that task i would encourage you all to buy books from a market, to join the haymarket book club. We are inviting people to make donations to the publisher during this discussion, and there will be information on the screen about how you can do so. This video will be recorded and also shared afterwards on the haymarket books youtube channel. You are invited to subscribe to this channel, to like this figure, to share it, and on that channel you can see the number of wonderful events that are already taken place. And there will be a special program on may day this year, may 1, at 5 p. M. , a discussion between stacey davis skates and senator nelson on a workingclass vision for the future featuring and at 7 p. M. On may 1st a poet will be hosting a special maybe online Poetry Reading with stacy and martin and a number of other important artists. Just a little more housekeeping. With so solar people joining te call today, we may need your forbearance if we have any technical issues. If your stream gets choppy, i would suggest that you reduce your image quality, and or the instructions on how to do so in the chat. We will post please, asking you to please post questions on the live video feed for from ovr you watching it. You can do that on the youtube channel, they spoke. You can comment and also respond to the video on twitter if you have any questions. Now its my pleasure to bring in Arundhati Roy who joins us from new delhi. And i just would say at the very brief introduction, as with so many people around the world, arundhati is a critical thinker was thinking and critical work and clarity and brilliance and integrity and ethical witness deeply inspired me. I cherish her voice, her character, everything that she writes loosely over and over again. I essentially have a practice, if theres something she has written i immediately read it. It really is transformative work, so thank you, arundhati, and welcome. Thank you. How lovely to see you again. Really lovely in these troubled times. I want to begin with the word portal, and for me and i suspect for so many people it resonated deeply. Its an architectural word. Its a technological word, and i love sort of the way in which its a metaphor but theres something literal about it that we are cocreators in this moment of the way forward. I wonder if you could Say Something about that choice of word and the work that it does for you and for us . I think it had to do with some out it had to do with my [inaudible] when we were locked down and i was thinking do we have a present, you know . Because somehow it feels as if we dont have present, as if there is a past and theres a future, and the present is in the lounge, you know, sort of echoes of the past and the premonition of the future, the kind of to our future. We cant go to the present. When i was thinking about so much of it is set in a graveyard, is that just a graveyard for dying. Theres a moment to talk about that holds the gates open. For people to come and go. For different ways to meet. And i said because i think just as the world has been frozen, you, me, everyone listening and almost anyone else in the world, even a moment of contemplation and isolation, and perhaps able to think of a way of trying to undo the terrible wounds that have been inflicted by the human race on this planet that we live in. At the same time that our people who are just the complete opposite or lets say you and me, who are preparing to move through this order, deepening the injustice, centralizing the data thinking of more and more ways of controlling and afflicting more and more damage. I really think that when i said we have to decide whether we want to work through it nicely or whether we want to drive the caucuses of our prejudice and hatred and dead ideas. I think it was, i said we went i know that even though i know its such a huge conflict in the world and you cant use that word. If it was in the hope that even the people who has so far commuted the word to where it is now, use this moment to think and move behind some luggage and walk through it. What you just said sort of draws me to one of the things i think is a conundrum of this moment in that the virus itself betrays rules of borders and statuses, you know, that word pandemic is so powerful because it reaches the on the boundaries of human creation. And yet we have an architecture of the social relations that keeps suffering upon suffering for some, right, and allows for the creation of sort of some kind of form of protection for others. I wonder if, as you say this moment of contemplation, how we get to the point where we both sort of our reckoning with the human connection, right, are sort of collective humanity and yet also seems to me so important to keep hold of the fact that this is not affecting everyone the same way. Not at all. In fact, i think what it is done, this virus, is it looks like an mri on society, countries, and expose you know, almost the same way that the virus seems to prey on people who have with the call comorbidity. Its doing the same thing socially, society. Its expanding and amplifying all the weaknesses, all the injustices, all the relations and all the costs, all of that, and in trying you know, in the u. S. , i mean, for example, your reading more and more in the u. S. And the uk, how its affecting africanamerican communities much more than others. In india, Something Else has happened, which is the virus itself has not made itself so manifest yet. Although you cant trust the numbers because we one of the lowest testing rates in the world, and what a lot of the tests seem to suggest that you dont know. I mean, some people suggest its lower ninth stream. Some people suggest that he is the reason white has a really got its claws into us. But the steps that we are taking towards handling the crisis that is yet to, has painted such a huge crisis, and that crisis has affected the poorer, unimaginably, unimaginably. So both cases, the cure as well as the illness in america or in europe, that is expose disproportionally how unjust those societies are. Can you talk a bit more about how thats manifest in india, this sort of response to the virus itself . How that has unfolded. You know, a few things happen which is that the first case of covid was recorded here in india on the 30th of january. But between 30 january and right up to midmarch nothing was really known, nobody paid any attention. There were other things to do. There was a huge crisis, a political crisis in india, because of the antimuslim relationship. There were massive protests, and sentenced up to 1 Million People the street. Mostly led by women, mostly led by muslim women, complete, completely nonviolent. It was come in what was a very suddenly you had people come out and defend an idea of diversity, of secularism. You had poetry. There was a resistant that clearly was hot. This moment, you know, promulgated in a massacre in delhi. Hindu vigilante mob attacked the working muslim class, about 50 people were killed because people were prepared for this and fought back. Bodies were still being pulled out. In fact, killings happen when trump was here. Trump arrived in the last week of february in india so what was already making its way but you had 100,000 people to greet him in the stadium. Gave 1. 38 billion people from 8 pm to midnight and said there was going to be a lockdown. Everything will be shot, mass transport wouldnot be available to anybody. So the next day, suddenly the cities of india were a technical experiment in dehumanizing people who are crowned into the outskirts and into dickensian sentiment like buildings. You know, cramped quarters which are actually factory floors. Working with construction and im talking about Many Industries , the 24th of the month they hadnt got food, the landlords told them there was no mass transport and these are all people who are basically from villages. Who are young men who come to work in the city. Who supplement their income, and in an agrarian economy and they had no food, no money so they began to trek back home, like hundreds of kilometers. So this kind of biblical exodus of people, just walking up mostly men but women and children, walking these hundreds of kilometers to their villages. I had a media card so i went out and walked a little while to the border. I spoke to people and it was, you know, then there were so many videos that i dont know if you saw them. Of people being brutalized. Not just beaten but humiliated. Made to jump down. Others were caught and hosed down with chemicals. Some people had been walking for days were stopped and told they must go back to where they came from because they would be setting off riots. Some people after days of walkingreached their villages but werent allowed in. And that situation remained as such right now where you have a hunger crisis, then you have this heated crisis with what is happening in the muslim community. You have an Unemployment Crisis which was already a crisis before that started and you have a lockdown where the Prime Minister of this huge country without even consulting the chief ministers, just ordered this lockdown. Now the problem is how do you unburden that barrier . There is a shift that converts into a world which is veryhard to know how to come out of. And that it was already reeling under of the Health Crisis. You had a 25 percent cases in the world in india which is millions of people and every day about 1400 people die of tv. You have now nutrition and little children, almost 1 million children, 800 something thousand children die of dehydration. And now this huge Health Crisis which of course just like in europe has Public Health and privatized so now you have 20 percent of the Public Health system trying to deal with this massive crisis and these Health Issues have only been put on hold. So today you talk about the contours of the real crisis. One of the things that i so appreciated that you wrote about is the manner in which sort of something about the us that has been revealed to the world in this moment. And that description you offered, what becomes clear is the thread of connection for working people all over the globe. With what the ways in which this virus is still sort of stackingupon them. And one of the things that i have been astonished by, just watching news both nationally in the states but also internationally is that even at it as thats happening, we are being sort of said this idolatry about markets and economy and the institutions that we are supposed to have this kind of worshipful relationship to. This idea that one has to support this world of business that already doesnt tend to the majority of people around the world. And so i think it reveals that its a requirement that we have to educate ourselves. What to have faith in. Where to place our energy and at the same time, theres this urgency. As you said, the moment of contemplation, of potential transformation and it also feels as if theres this urgency that we cant wait and its another one ofthose push polls of the moment. And im just thinking, wondering how you i dont know, distribute your attention or your communication, especially since we are so isolated about how to both dodge the potential transformation and also deal with the immediacy of the daily suffering. Its a very dangerous position that all of us are in rightnow , because you see we talk about the immediacy of the daily suffering and what it is doing in a place like the us. And whats happening, i mean, ive spoken about the hunger and the natural system here but while this lockdown is uponus , while all of us are locked into our home there is no lockdown on totalitarianism. There is no lockdown on the massive amount of arrests thats happening daily and around young students, mostly muslims who are all the people who are seen as having been part of that protest. Theyre now being accused of murder and all kinds of outlandish things and going to prison but i think what youre seeing is very important because i find myself wondering and even wondering if one can bear to wonder about this. But while everybody is so freely using the vocabulary of war to speak about this virus and im thinking but war is about killing people and presumably what youre doing is about healing people. But i think it has to do with the systems and the peculiar imagination where we and especially western society contain inside these ideas of a civilized and a progressive and all that. Theres fundamentally this idea of adulation. In the Nuclear Weapons program, the Weapons Program and the biological Weapons Program and its held up with this adulation. Goldilocks Ecological Systems in order to be able to expect what the capitalist market needs. So we already know that these wars, there being so cruel. The kind of bombing of afghanistan. The sanctions on iraq with syria. Theyre searching around for a vaccine for this virus and when the sanctions wereon in iraq , the medicine was denied to people and that was considered a fine strategy. So how do you really think about the fact that these very people, this very formation that is dealing with this pandemic and trying to serve people in whatever way they are doing in hospitals and using you know, money and all of that. That feeling, that power structure is prepared to move towards creating a Climate Crisis which will make the coronavirus look benign. So what are we supposed to think of that intelligence . How do we communicate to human beings that if thats happening now, weve got to walk through this portal so that we dont want this earth to be destroyed. Can we collectively, because its not going to be given to us. Were going to have to fight for it but to fight for it youre going to have to realize that this suffering is going to bemanifold. Many times over, if its something that doesntchange at the policy level. Not just at the level of lets all be whatever, at a policy level. And how are we going to make that happen . So thats is actually immediate. Its not policy, its actually a very immediate moment that we do have to seize because the plans to do otherwise on. Right now its happening, right now whats happening is that nationally , authoritarianism is colluding with International Disaster capital and they are preparing another world for us. Which will be you know, if corporate globalization was advanced capitalism, now were going to move and they would like us to move into an even more advanced version of that where you have the Gates Foundation owning, the who deciding Public Policy and how to make massive profits out of whatever is going to roll out. And that really was, if we were sleepwalking into a sovereign state, now we are panic running towards it. And its, there is that for me, related to what youre saying, the feeling that there is such an extension of surveillance in this moment and submission and this idea that we have to submit to the authoritarian powers in order to protect ourselves but it really is as you are saying such a privatized notion of even protecting ourselves. Not about policy and also not about the earth as a whole. This shared space, so that we agree to being asked extra surveilled in every possible way. In india right now, its really, theres a sort of act that the Prime Minister asked people to download and theres this fastest downloaded app in the world. Millions ofpeople have downloaded it. The ideas of privacy or any kind of protection of your data, that doesnt exist but the thing is maybe you are alert to the use oflanguage but to me , its terrifying when i read the papers and i read people who may or may not have the virus. The whole ministry process sent out a circular saying when the lockdown opens, if a person joins an office and is found to have the virus, they will be criminallyprosecuted. So now you have people who are asymptomatic who have no idea that they are sick and now they are going to be criminalized or you have another circuit who says the workers walking home who are remaining in the city, they wont be allowed to go home. When things open up. But they will be checked and if they do not have the virus , they will be. Their work will be profiled and industries whichare allowed to reopen can use them. So we see all this being put into place. This extremely is disturbing. Is somebody going to be checked if there well or not well . If there well, what consequences . So this kind of continuing to place these notions which will just have serious outlandish consequences sometime ago and we rush to embrace them. We rush to embrace electronic incarceration and humiliation. Its very disturbing. Its fascinating to me that i on the one hand, there are these new technologies of incarceration. What you described just reminded me of a man who was brutalized and arrested in philadelphia for not wearinga mask. By police officers, which was exactly the opposite of social distancing but then it becomes another way to legitimize policing and state violence. And i was also thinking that we have these technological forms of surveillance and then we very kind of oldfashioned forms of brutality and domination. And one of the questions that came in and i wanted to sort of modify it a little bit but it was about the way that your metaphor of traveling light and light luggage. And thinking about that in light of when you wrote about the long march, i also thought about the trail of tears in the United States and the role of Indigenous People and youve written about that more recent history. And also the Transatlantic Slave Trade and forms of deportation and the partition. T