'What's exciting is that writing has become a weapon'      1.
Listening to Grasshoppers   2. : Field Notes on Democracy   3.
Find this on the Guardian bookshop   This compulsion - towards
reporting and polemic - Roy blames in part on the success of The
God of Small Things. She wrote her novel for four and a half
years entirely in secret; even her husband, the film-maker
Pradip Krishen, did not know of its existence until it was
finished. And she wrote it for herself. She had written a couple
of film scripts before that and had come to despise the
collaborative creative process. The book was an exercise in
downshifting. She imagined when it was published that it would
sell "maybe 500 copies in Delhi." In fact, it sold 6m copies
worldwide and won her the Booker Prize.  "The prize," she says
now, "was actually responsible in many ways for my political
activism. I won this thing and I was suddenly the darling of the
new emerging Indian middle class - they needed a princess. They
had the wrong woman. I had this li