About Book
The Shape of the Beast is our world laid bare, with great courage, passion and eloquence, by a mind that has engaged unhesitatingly with its changing realities, often anticipating the way things have moved in the last decade.
In the fourteen interviews collected here, conducted between January 2001 and September 2008, Arundhati Roy examines the nature of state and corporate power as it has emerged during this period, and the shape that resistance movements are taking. As she speaks, among other things, about people displaced by dams and industry, the genocide in Gujarat, Maoist rebels, the war in Kashmir and the global War on Terror, she raises fundamental questions about democracy, justice and non-violent protest.
Unabashedly political, this is also a deeply personal collection. Through the conversations, Arundhati talks about the necessity of taking a stand, as also the dilemma of guarding the private space necessary for writing in a world that demands urgent, unequivocal intervention. And in the final interview, she discusses with uncommon candour her ambiguous feelings about success and both the pressures and the freedom that come with it.
About Author
Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997. Two volumes of her non-fiction writing, The Algebra of Infinite Justice and An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, were published by Penguin India in 2001 and 2005 respectively. She lives in New Del