The God Of Small Things, By Arundhati Roy

My untamed and uncommon mother could be one of them, in both wonderful and cruel ways. She comes from a Syrian Christian family that can’t be count as wealthy at all. Then she married an outsider, a Bengali, got divorced within a couple of years and came back to Ayemenem to live with her mother. In Kerala, everyone has what is called a tharawaad. If you don't have a father, there’s no way you can have a tharawaad. Without tharawaad, you're a person without an address. I grew up in Ayemenem, the village in which The God of Small Things is set. Given the way things have turned out, it's easy for me to say that I thank God that I had none of the conditioning that a normal, middle class Indian girl would have. I had no father, I didn't have a caste, I didn't have a class, and I had no religion, no
I’m honored to be here today in Los Angeles. I know there are many other movies or books you could have chosen to read and watch, but that you chose to this one about India, about two fraternal twins, about a Syrian- Christian family instead, means a lot to me. Thank you again.

I myself grew up in Kerala, always dreaming of escape from a life of tradition but then came up against a type of modernity that I longed for fleeing from too. In this country I live in where we have people who practice female infanticide, female feticide in which millions of girl children are killed-and not only in traditional rural communities-we have honor killings based on caste, but at the same time we have the freest, strongest, most vibrant women anywhere in the world, the most independent and radical women, those incredible and original thinkers who are on the front-lines of inequalities and struggles—in India- we live in several centuries