A month ago, as she faced a roomful of journalists in Italy, writer Arundhati Roy was asked what it is like to be an icon of peace-seekers around the world. "First of all," she advised her audience, "always be suspicious of icons." And indeed she does not behave like one. She is generous and curious in listening to others, she answers her own phone and does not have any personal assistants. "Secondly," she continued, "I am not a pacifist. I come from a feudal society. Being a pacifist in a society like that means accepting the existing order. My whole life I have been involved and have engaged in various kinds of resistance, which is the opposite of pacifism."
Roy won the Man Booker Prize and international fame thanks to her quasi-autobiographical novel "The God of Small Things" in 1996. When she walks down the street in Delhi, people recognize her. But, she adds, "It is a little ironic to talk about the fame of a writer in a country 400 million of whose billion inhabitants are illiterate."
This is a characteristic reaction for Roy, who seems to channel every personal question into a political observation. And thus she leads her listeners on an alternative trip in India. And therefore perhaps more than being an icon of anything, Arundhati Roy is an iconoclast. For example, the truism that India is a democracy -- the world's largest -- or the worship of the Moloch of development. She even wants to reexamine the image and status of Mahatma Gandhi.
