An Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire

An Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire
Author: Arundhati Roy

Whatever you may think of her opinions, she is hard to put down. Although some of her questions are rhetorical and occasionally she gets a cheap shot in, her ease of covering the breadth of modernity and the connections between different parts of the world is striking.

When I read her essay written immediately after 9/11, at the time I thought she had gone over the top. In hindsight, reading it now, she seems to have hit pretty close to the mark. That's a pretty good accomplishment, to hit it close and write about it at the same moment in history.

For me, reading her has been illuminating since she refers often to political trends, social tendencies, and grassroots movements in specific places in India.

I read this book while traveling through Ladakh in August 2006.