This piece is part of the OGA Voicesseries, highlighting activists whose words and work inspire collective liberation.
There are writers who observe the world, and then there are writers who throw themselves into its fractures. Arundhati Roy belongs to the second category. She is a novelist of extraordinary literary power, but she is also one of our most unflinching political voices, an activist who has used her platform to speak truth to power with a courage that has cost her dearly.
Her words have become a mantra for movements worldwide:
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
These lines, written in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, have traveled far beyond the essay where they first appeared. They are shared as a poem, a prayer, a promise. But they were not born in a moment of quiet optimism. They were forged in the mind of an activist who has spent decades insisting that the work of justice is neither abstract nor distant, but alive, gendered, and already moving among us.
Watch Arundhati Roy read from her essay “The Pandemic is a Portal”
The Activist Behind the Words
For many, Arundhati Roy first arrived as a literary comet. Her 1997 novel, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize and made her a global literary figure. But Roy refused the role of a writer sequestered from the world. Instead, she stepped directly into the most contentious political struggles of her time.
In the decades since, she has become one of India’s most prominent, and most persecuted, political voices. In 2024, she was ordered to stand trial under India’s Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for a speech she gave in 2010 on Kashmir. She has faced dozens of criminal cases for her speech, including sedition charges for her critique of Hindu nationalism. She has been threatened, silenced, and hounded by the state. And yet she has continued to speak.
Her activism spans some of the defining struggles of our era: resistance to corporate globalization, opposition to the privatization of water and public services, solidarity with Indigenous communities fighting displacement, outspoken critique of the Indian state’s increasingly authoritarian turn, and unwavering support for Palestinian liberation. She does not treat these as separate issues. For Roy, they are connected by a single thread: the refusal to accept that existing structures of power are the only possible world.
“The Pandemic Is a Portal”
The famous quote about another world breathing on the horizon comes from her 2020 essay, “The Pandemic is a Portal,” published in The Financial Times. Written at a moment of collective crisis, the essay argued that the pandemic had created a rupture, a break in the normal order of things. In that rupture, she wrote, we faced a choice: step back into the same broken system, or step forward into something new.
Roy wrote:
“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”
The lines that followed were not a naive call for hope. They were an activist’s declaration. Roy was naming what she had already witnessed: the mutual aid networks forming in slums, the communities refusing eviction, the caregivers working without state support, the ordinary people building solidarity where governments offered only neglect.
When she wrote, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way,” she was not describing a distant utopia. She was describing what she had seen with her own eyes. The new world, in her telling, is not a blueprint. It is a presence.It is already breathing in the small, persistent acts of care and resistance that happen daily, often unseen.
Speaking Truth to Power: The Berlin Film Festival
In February 2026, Roy demonstrated once again that her activism is not confined to the page. She was scheduled to attend the Berlin International Film Festival to present a restored version of her 1989 film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones. But when the festival’s jury president responded to a question about Gaza by saying cinema should “stay out of politics,” Roy made a decision. She withdrew from the festival entirely.
In a statement that quickly circulated globally, Roy wrote:
“To hear them say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping. It is a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time, when artists, writers and film makers should be doing everything in their power to stop it.”
She did not mince words about what she believes is happening in Gaza. “Let me say this clearly: what has happened in Gaza, what continues to happen, is a genocide of the Palestinian people by the State of Israel,” she wrote. She added that the governments supporting Israel, including the United States and Germany, “makes them complicit in the crime.”
Coverage of Arundhati Roy’s withdrawal from the Berlin Film Festival
Gendering the New World
Why “she”? Why does another world arrive as feminine?
Roy’s choice is deliberate and political. The world we are trying to escape, the world of extraction, militarism, patriarchy, and endless accumulation, has long been framed in masculine terms. It is the language of conquest, of “hard” power, of dominance over land and body. By gendering the new world as female, Roy gestures toward an alternative tradition: one rooted in nurturing, in relational power, in the long history of women’s leadership in movements for environmental justice, peace, and community survival.
This is not essentialism. It is a strategic reclamation. Roy centers the feminine not to exclude, but to name what has been devalued by the systems we seek to transform. Care, interdependence, listening, these are not weaknesses. They are the architecture of another world.
“On a Quiet Day, I Can Hear Her Breathing”
The final line of Roy’s famous quote is perhaps the most radical. It asks us to be still. In an age of constant noise, performative outrage, and the relentless churn of bad news, Roy suggests that the work of building another world includes the work of listening.
To hear the new world breathing is to recognize that it is not a future project but a present reality. It exists in the community garden that was once a vacant lot. It exists in the neighbor who checks on the elderly resident. It exists in the solidarity fund, the land back movement, the prison abolition workshop, the strike, the protest, the quiet refusal to comply with injustice.
For activists who are exhausted, and who among us is not, this line offers something precious. It says: the world you are working for is not waiting for you at the finish line. She is here. She is breathing. You are not building her from scratch. You are helping her breathe more freely.
A Voice for Our Times
Arundhati Roy’s activism is not separate from her writing. Her essays are acts of political intervention. Her speeches are acts of solidarity. Her willingness to face the consequences of her speech is a model of courage in an era when so many are intimidated into silence.
At OGA, we lift up voices that refuse to accept that the world as it is must remain the world as it will be. Roy’s voice is among the most vital we have. She reminds us that another world is not a fantasy. It is a living thing, gendered and breathing, already on her way.
And on quiet days, if we listen, we can hear her too.
This piece is part of the OGA Voices series. For more reflections on the movements building another world, explore our ongoing coverage here.
