listening to grasshoppers

from 'listening to grasshoppers', arundhati roy. apart from the content of her essays, i really love the way roy uses her prose to jab and thrust and parry. poetry in motion?

"Ironically, the era of the free market has led to the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in India—the secession of the middle and upper classes to a country of their own, somewhere up in the stratosphere where they merge with the rest of the world's elite. This Kingdom in the Sky is a complete universe in itself, hermetically sealed from the rest of India. It has its own newspapers, films, television programmes, morality plays, transport systems, malls and intellectuals. And in case you are beginning to think it's all joy-joy, you're wrong. It also has its own tragedies, its own environmental issues (parking problems, urban air pollution); its own class struggles. An organisation called Youth for Equality, for example, has taken up the issue of Reservations, because it feels Upper Castes are discriminated against by India's pulverised Lower Castes. It has its own People's Movements and candle-light vigils (Justice for Jessica, the model who was shot in a bar) and even its own People's Car (the Wagon for the Volks launched by the Tata Group recently). It even has its own dreams that take the form of TV advertisements in which Indian CEOs (smeared with Fair & Lovely Face Cream, Men's) buy over international corporations, including an imaginary East India Company. They are ushered into their plush new offices by fawning white women (who look as though they're longing to be laid, the final prize of conquest) and applauding white men, ready to make way for the new kings. Meanwhile, the crowd in the stadium roars to its feet (with credit cards in its pockets) chanting 'India! India!'"

read the full essay here

page 88, ISBN 0-553-27747-2

"To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as "the system" is to speak correctly...They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose...But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible."

~Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

and he then continues (later on in the book) to attack the 'foundation' of reason. and then defends it. and then attacks it again. seen that way, a little confusing, but it ties up.

zen. and motorcycle maintenance

people ask why i ride a yezdi. think this quote answers part of that.

""What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?", a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream."


~Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

maybe i really should think of getting that bullet.