Arundhathi Roy's famous "Come September" Speech

(It was in last december that I composed this mail, but remained in draft folder. Now went back to it as I've been reading this book 'The Shape of The Beast', collection of interviews with her, about her 'career' as an Activist.)

"We", is a 64min film, sort of video montage, based on/interlaced with footage of Arundhathi Roy's famous "Come September" Speech in the US in Sep 2002, a year after 9/11,  after accepting Lannan Foundation's "Cultural Freedom Prize"( recognizing "people whose extraordinary and courageous work celebrates the human right to freedom of imagination, inquiry, and expression.")

The speech covers the world politics of power, US 'War on Terror' and its military actions across the world, wrong propaganda by Govt to mislead the public, Israel's occupation of Palestine, capitalism, corporate globalisation, deception and exploitation.  

(talk really starts after ~4min)

Just the original speech is here:

 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=945405493000735497#

From weroy.org :

"We" is a free documentary produced by an anonymous producer in New Zealand. It was released for free on the Internet and first appeared at an Australian web site. Later her sympathisers online created weroy.org  ["After seeing the film, we felt it was very important, cool, and overall just fantastic piece of work..  weroy.org was created to assist the efforts that others put forth in getting this free documentary seen by the citizens of the world." ]

The person who created the video says: 

 "For me, she had a unique ability to recontextualise, exhibit, and articulate in a new way - much of what I already understood about the world.

And she was able to do so from a perspective that I call truly geopolitical. That is, a human perspective of the world that sees and exists outside of any given culture (e.g. western, indian, asian, white, or otherwise). 

She showed me a macro view that cradles all the micro views that people cling to everyday."

-x-

(most might know this bit..)

Arundhati Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya,^[1] India, to a Keralite Syrian Christian mother, the women's rights activist Mary Roy, and aBengali father, Ranjit Roy, a tea planter by profession.

She spent her childhood in Aymanam in Kerala, and went to school at Corpus Christi, Kottayam, followed by the Lawrence School, Lovedale, near Ooty. 

She left Kerala for Delhi at age 16, and embarked on a homeless lifestyle, staying in a small hut with a tin roof within the walls of Delhi's Feroz Shah Kotla and making a living selling empty bottles. She then proceeded to study architecture at the Delhi School of Architecture, where she met her first husband, the architect Gerard da Cunha. )

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