A Small Revolution + Thoughts on Arundhati Roy’s Azadi

26 May 2026

On a random visit to a friend’s place this week, I asked him to show me his book collection and picked up a few books to explore. I started reading Arundhati Roy’s Azadi, a collection of some of her essays that reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism, particularly in India.

Last year, on a walk with my friend group, someone asked a question. I replied, “100 years ago, if I’d been born, I’d have been malnourished, likely cleaning toilets. Likely, I would not have been allowed to be educated even if I wanted to, and for me to drink water somewhere, I’d have had to go out of the room and use a different tap or source, and walk using different bylanes in the village. Today, I have this life with all the privilege in the world. I got myself a degree, the first in my entire family from a city like Pune. I know how to speak and read English. I’m working well, I decide what I wish to work on, and I have control over my time and my life. I’m a Dalit, and none of this would have been possible 100 years ago. All of this happened because there are folks who fought for my rights so I could stand equal with the rest of the world. These folks did it so I could be in a better place. Whatever time I’ll spend in my lifetime, I need to do something so that the folks 100 years later will be able to live more easily in a certain aspect of their lives. That’s how I’d answer his question. The question my friend asked was, “What’s the point of life?”

Last month, on 14th April, the world celebrated the birth anniversary of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. My observation this year was that the folks doing the good work - eye checkup camps, distributing books, giving away food, were silenced by the loud DJs and firecrackers. Same festival but two different sides. I saw that at a place called Vishrantwadi in Pune, they installed four large stages facing each other and compared it to Tomorrowland. Keep in mind, this is for Ambedkar Jayanti.

At concert venues in the West, music volume is capped at 102 decibels and if you cross that limit - expect legal action, penalties, and suspension of your operating licenses. In India, it’s the opposite. The louder you are, the better, and there’s absolutely no limit. Some are so loud that your doors and windows would shake and you’ll feel physical discomfort. Every festival is permission for the general public to fuck up the environment, air, water and sound.

I’m not the kind who generally ignores these problems easily. I don’t know how I cannot notice these while my parents are rarely bothered by this nuisance. I also cannot ignore the broken roads, lack of footpaths, garbage on the roads, unclean rivers, poor food quality, etc. It’s a complete “Welcome to India” starter pack. There are streamers in the West who search through Google Maps Street View until they find garbage on the streets in this country.

I frequently travel on a route close to my home when visiting another part of the city. There’s a Jaiprakash Nagar metro station with a huge mural showing what the city is known for: landmarks, the tiger, etc.

[embed]

For such a nice building that’s well connected, at a prime location, and accessible to people, you’d expect the space in the building to be used for music, art, dance, spreading culture, and by intellectuals, writers, and poets. But no, there’s an ugly-looking Lenskart store at that junction.

At the same place, on the footpath next to the mural, you will find a statue of pens, paint brushes, etc., where I also frequently find people shooting videos for reels and clicking photos, and all you have next to it are a number of huge shopping stores. Not saying people should not make money, but all they are doing is making money.

When will things change?

What lies ahead? Reimagining the world. Only that.

After the success of her TGOST, she spent time writing essays and only released a new book, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, after two decades. I did not know much about her essays, likely because they are thoughtful and about the real world, something that mainstream media loves to ignore.

But there’s a hack to escape all of this, where you can be happy in your own bubble: 30 lakhs per year. With this amount, you’ll get your life sorted and all the comforts will be taken care of. Anyway, the public has stopped expecting clean food, air, water, and surroundings from the government. With this amount, if you are living in a metro in the country, all the interesting things you’ll do and the people you’ll hang out with will ensure you don’t need to look at the dirty parts of the country.

Policemen in Tamil Nadu killed a father-son duo in custody? I have a spa appointment. People arrested for air quality protests? I am playing pickleball tonight. Violence after election results? Let’s check out the new Japanese restaurant.

I studied urban planning, and by my 3rd year, I had decided I wouldn’t pursue this course. The teachers really meant nothing of what they were preaching. I hated most of them except 2 folks who were friendly. They tried teaching a lot of stuff from their outdated syllabus, gave me worthless assignments that didn’t contribute to my learning, and were generally cut off from the world in their own bubble of this field.

I saw my seniors still struggling with jobs, unless they had really worked hard or were going for their master’s. I didn’t wish to study any further, and I had to figure out my own escape plan. I barely completed my degree with passing marks, and here’s another reason why I hated my course:

I got a nice internship, I was also paid for my work which was very rare for our batch, and one of the projects I worked on was doing a safety audit of the BRT route of Pune’s sister city Pimpri-Chinchwad. Again, I hated that work. Just a few weeks into my internship, I had an online countdown on my laptop just to count how many days were left. A couple of months after my internship, I saw that metro construction had started on the same route where I did the safety audit. I hated seeing that nobody updated me and my boss did not bother telling me about this. You realise what’s happening? A two-year old project with budget sanctioned for it was scrapped entirely.

What I studied is the course that‘s responsible for all the broken footpaths in this country. We studied stuff like traffic planning, landscaping, planning townships, sustainability, and more. How much of it is implemented today? Zero.

[embed]8 Years Without a “Real Job” It was the summer of 2017, I was sitting at my work desk at 5 pm waiting for the clock to hit 6 so I could leave work…vrushabhg.medium.com

That’s because most of this work is done by civil engineers and architects. Most of my seniors are literally fighting to get into positions where folks from this degree can handle such decisions. I don’t have that activist personality, and I don’t wish to be in such a career field. A few days ago, I left all my alumni groups.

Broken footpaths are definitely one thing that bothers me, and I can’t neglect them. But there’s a whole different game being played by the right wing of the country, which is in a hurry to make the country a clown nation. Here I am trying to keep my city clean, consume less wherever possible, drive well, but what the right wing is doing is absolutely horrific. It’s beyond my control. For a long time, I have tried to ignore this. It is not worth my time, and neither do I have a circle that talks about this actively.

In today’s age, when tech is integrating with our lives, something this country seriously lacks, and where people talk about what the future could be, we are decades behind and are progressing backwards if you take the average IQ over the years into account.

Except for some parts in places like Kerala, the North East, some hill stations, and pockets of Mumbai, the whole country is a low-trust society where the travel experience will not be good for a well-educated person.

I read Arundhati Roy’s Azadi and can see how some claim to be an anti-national if you read her works. How do you not become one? I cannot believe cases were filed against a fictional piece of work decades ago that are still going on.

Like I said, most don’t bother when they get bad water, air, and public services.

Morgan Housel, in his latest book The Art of Spending Money, says that you can grow up with your family positively in two ways: be rich and not be close to them, or have family values and a sense of belonging and be not-so-rich. Unfortunately, I don’t have either.

I wish my family or school had just taught me how to invest money. Had I known how poor they are at handling their own and my lives, I’d have started investing when I was 10. It’s surprising how nobody at a steel plant taught this to my father in his two decades of experience.

Heck, I’m reading Arundhati Roy’s book The Doctor and the Saint, about Ambedkar and Gandhi. The book talks about caste. I can’t even tell anyone from my family that I’m doing this, let alone talk about the contents of the book. They won’t get it.

All this upliftment, progressive mindset, and reservation mean nothing when a person can’t escape their own low thinking.

I can say this for sure: they don’t have the spine to take a stand for things. They simply exist, unbothered.

It took me a while to realise that a lot of people don’t do wrong because they fear God. That simply means they would do a lot of wrong if God did not exist. This is what man has come down to. I don’t think I’ll ever again visit any religious place. What’s the point if such a place is not imparting any wisdom to these folks? Not to mention how most of these places, have purely become businesses. I protest the existence of any such places. Fuck you if you need the existence of God to remain a good person.

The other thing I am going to actively start protesting is when someone asks me what my surname is. I know exactly what you are trying to know. This incident happens to me at least twice every year. It’s easy to deal with when it’s a stranger. I can fight and mention how cheap they are, but it becomes tricky when it’s a friend’s family member.

Brave are the people who fight for all of this. The book is also available for free on the Internet Archive. She did think ahead, who knows when they will ban this one?

Reading this work has been a small revolution for me.

You may check out everything I wrote between June 2022 and November 2023 on this page; I then moved to this platform. Would love to know your thoughts on this piece. Feel free to comment here or reach out on LinkedIn or Twitter. Stay updated with my new pieces by following on Medium or subscribe via email. A donation will go a long way and will make my day (& life if its significant enough?); always happy to talk about writing and life. Another simple way to support my work is to share this piece with someone you thought of while reading! Cheers!