![[attachments/The-Personal-Is-Political-An-Activist's-Memoir.jpg|height=240]] ## Review This is a fantastic book that I enjoyed reading thoroughly. Aruna Roy reflects with depth into her experience of walking into a life of activism through a deeply personal lens. And she finds the foundations of her wider political choices within individual experiences of discomfort with herself, but also with the wider social environment in which she finds herself in. It's a very beautiful account woven through multiple early experiences of hers as a civil servant in Rajasthan, where she has to often confront her own privileged upbringing and the expression of liberties that she has experienced at an individual level with situations where people are entangled within social structures, which continuously limits them from experiencing the freedoms that they otherwise ought to experience. One of the first few chapters is titled "The Personal is Political" and it is a kind of a foundational chapter for what follows. "Being a witness to one's own internal thoughts is a powerful instrument of reflection that she uses." She says in Chapter 2, "Very often as I stand to address people, I am both the speaker and the one who listens. This witness offers a constant critique." This is a powerful lesson for everyone who engages either as an activist or merely as an intellectual exercise of seeking social change and social transformation. There is of course an overwhelming and powerful lens of womanhood and gender, but it intersects beautifully with other aspects of inequalities like caste and class. Several anecdotal occurrences of the struggles that she has been involved in including the Right to Information Act struggles and the Employment Guarantee and NREGA. Towards the later chapters is sections which offer an insight into social movements and participatory processes. A powerful lesson for NGOs and civil society where she asserts on page 266 that “institutions have to be seen as instruments for justice, not as citadels of power which when occupied become fortresses to defect.” ## Reading status - Status: Reading - My rating: 4 - Date started / added: 2025/09/21 - Date finished: — ## Metadata - Author: Aruna Roy - Year: — - ISBN13: ="9789356996526" - Shelves (Goodreads): read --- Last updated: 2025-12-30 16:03