Christiane Amanpour (3:18)

It was a time, as I said, when, you know, the UN Secretary General was a major figure on the global stage, that just using the bully pulpit, so to speak, even if he couldn't actually be, you know, political leader, carried a huge amount of moral and executive weight as well. So how did he rise from that fairly, you know, humble start in that village without electricity in Burma to where he ended up?

Thant Min U (3:45)

Yeah, it's an extraordinary story. I mean, he was from a well to do family, but suddenly impoverished. So he couldn't finish university until he was almost 40. He was a schoolteacher then headmaster in this, in this little town that was a day's steamer ride away from Rangoon, which was then part of the British Empire. And at almost age 40, he decides on a midlife career change. Within 10 years of government service in Rangoon, he finds himself the Burmese Ambassador to the un. Burma just become independent in the middle of this new global politics, living in midtown Manhattan. And within just a few years of that, he becomes the only human being in the world that Kennedy and Khrushchev can agree on to save the UN at a time of deep crisis and Cold War conflict.

Christiane Amanpour (4:29)

And he was the first Asian Secretary General. And this is important because he came at a time when Asia, Africa, as you call it in the book, was emerging as independent, newly decolonized nations. And that he was considered really somebody who had their back and who understood what they needed to do. I'm going to get to Kennedy, Khrushchev, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam. But since it is today, the day after this whole ceasefire has been announced, let me ask you about a key chapter in your book slightly later on about Thant, your grandfather, Secretary General, trying to intervene to bring peace in the Middle East. At that time it was between Israel and Egypt. It was the 67.

Werner Herzog (5:14)

Yeah.

Christiane Amanpour (5:15)

So what happened? Because it was very difficult then.

Thant Min U (5:19)

Yeah, absolutely. And I spent a lot of time trying to figure out whether he was to blame actually for, you know, these decades of conflict that we've had ever since. Well, because the Six Day War ended with the Israeli occupation of Sinai, Gaza, West Bank, Golan Heights, and set the stage for the Yom Kippur War in 73. And really all the half century of tension, conflict, displacement, everything else that we've had up until that point. So I went back to that, that origin, the six days of the War and the weeks leading up to it. And he played a very decisive role because he pulled out UN peacekeepers from the front line. So many blamed him for that.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (5:56)

Blamed him?

Christiane Amanpour (5:57)

How did he do it?

Thant Min U (5:58)

Well, Nasser, who was the leader of Egypt at the time, it was a time of growing tension with Jordan, with Syria as well. The Israelis felt threatened. But some on the Israeli side also felt this was an opportunity not just to sort of settle scores, but to kind of expand Israel's military presence in the region, if even if just for defensive reasons at the time. And now we know that the Lyndon Johnson administration had green lighted the Israelis in attacking Egypt, but the Egyptians, not really fully aware of this, thought they would rattle their sword and move tens of thousands of Egyptian troops up to the front line. So they demanded these peacekeepers withdraw. I mean, the peacekeepers were lightly armed. They were going to leave anyway. So there was not much my grandfather could do. But he was a useful scapegoat by those who wanted to say they had no alternative but to take military action at that point.

Christiane Amanpour (6:48)

And you fast forward to when Nasser was dead and Anwar Sadat was president and it was the rumblings of a new war, the 73 war. And you talk about how Thant you thant got some kind of agreement from Sadat to not, you know, become another warrior in terms of. But there was. Israel disagreed with that, right? Yeah.

Thant Min U (7:10)

And not just Israel, because I mean, Richard Nixon actually wanted the UN at first to play a role in this. So Utha with his mediator, engaged in this sort of shuttle diplomacy and basically pulled together an agreement where Israel would actually withdraw from all of the occupied territories. And in return there would be airtight security guarantees for Israel, a huge peacekeeping force of maybe 30,000, including Soviet and American troops, surrounding Israel to protect it. And that would be the basis of a permanent peace. And at the last minute it was Henry Kissinger who undermined it by basically advising Golda Meir, who had just about accepted it, to go against the plan that was there.

Christiane Amanpour (7:52)

And she was the Prime Minister of.

Thant Min U (7:53)

Israel, and she was the prime Minister of Israel at the time.

Christiane Amanpour (7:56)

And here we are all these decades later.

Thant Min U (7:58)

And that was a lost chance. And he felt that, I mean, Kissinger felt the Israelis and the Egyptians were sort of part of a chessboard, a global chessboard of Cold War diplomacy. I think Uthan felt, together with many others at the time, that if there was peace in the Middle east, the Arabs, the Egyptians themselves would probably eject the Soviets. They didn't want to be under anybody else's influence anyway. So I think he prioritized peace in the region rather than trying to see everything as part of sort of broader geopolitics.

Christiane Amanpour (8:25)

So let's rewind now to the whole Khrushchev, Kennedy period. You thant playing a role that I had no idea about. I thought it was all Kennedy and, you know, the 13 days, you know, the film, all the history about the Cuban Missile cris. And yet we find that your grandfather, Secretary General, you thant played a very, very significant role.

Arundhati Roy (8:48)

So.

Christiane Amanpour (8:52)

In a nutshell, first of all, did you know before you went looking for all of this, and what would you say his pivotal role was?

Thant Min U (9:00)

I mean, there's been a little bit of scholarship over the past few years, but in general, no. I mean, I watched probably the same film that you watched, and I saw, you know, an extra kind of sitting where he sits on the Security Council and thought, oh, there he is. And I didn't. I wasn't really aware of how critical his intervention was. I think one thing was, from the moment that Kennedy went on television and announced the blockade and the crisis was public, I think he realized, I think probably in a way that Kennedy and Khrushchev did as well when the world was on the brink of a nuclear holocaust, that this wasn't really a military crisis, it was a political crisis. And what he had to do as Secretary General of the UN Even without a mandate from the Security Council, from anyone else, is he had to craft that intervention, that series of secret messages, public messages, to give both men the time and the space, the political space they needed to take a step back.

Christiane Amanpour (9:49)

Yeah, and we have some incredibly, you know, amazing video that our producer discovered.

Unknown CNN Producer/Reporter (9:55)

He is here to confer with U thant before the acting Secretary General left for Cuba to arrange the dismantling of Soviet missile bases, met separately with both Russian and United States representatives to iron out some preliminary details before his conferences with Castro.

Christiane Amanpour (10:12)

So that was meeting with the Deputy Soviet Foreign Minister and the American minister, and he was off to Cuba. From the book, you know, he had done this directly through messages to the three heads of government in his meetings with Castro, in the many days of discussions with the others from first apart and then together, often over an amiable meal in the Secretary General's dining room. You know, those were the days where he could actually convene the major players and then be given actually a major role. And he did go to Havana, and he did basically, I mean, not in so many words, but read Castro the riot act.

Thant Min U (10:49)

I think. I mean, in many Ways, you know? Yeah, he. I mean, he read Castro the riot act, but he did something else as well. I mean, he said to Castro, look, you come from a small country, I come from a small country. You have every right to have foreign military bases or missiles. It's your sovereign right. But I'm trying to paint you the bigger picture. The world is on the verge of a nuclear war. We all need to take a deep breath and take a step back. And Castro accepted that. And the next day he went on Cuban television and said, u than showed us respect. And for him, that was the key in also accepting USANT as a neutral arbiter in a way that Khrushchev and Kennedy had already.

Christiane Amanpour (11:22)

So Khrushchev had written a letter to us Thant. I don't know whether you want to read it, but why not? It's from your book. It's there.

Thant Min U (11:29)

Sure.

Christiane Amanpour (11:29)

Do you have your glasses?

Thant Min U (11:30)

Yes. Now I can read it.

Christiane Amanpour (11:31)

Okay.

Thant Min U (11:31)

Dear Uthant, I have received your message and have carefully studied the proposal it contains. I welcome your initiative. I understand your concern over the situation which has arisen in the Caribbean, for the Soviet government too regards it as highly dangerous and is requiring immediate intervention by the United Nations. I wish to inform you that I agree with your proposal, which is in the interest of peace. With respect n Khrushchev.

Christiane Amanpour (11:54)

I mean, it is extraordinary. I mean, can you even imagine fast forward all these decades, you know, the Russians, the Americans over Ukraine, for instance, or any issue in the Security Council. This doesn't happen, does it?

Werner Herzog (12:06)

No.

Thant Min U (12:06)

And also, I mean, again, you know, the Security Council was deadlocked then as now. And so we have this wrong idea that the UN was frozen because of the Cold War, but the Secretary General wasn't frozen. The Secretary General then took action despite that and began to try to unlock some of these tensions and to try to de escalate crises. I think it was also a different time. I mean, in the public, there was an enormous amount of enthusiasm for the UN which meant that presidents even came to brief him in New York, for example, or he would spend a whole day with Khrushchev on the Black Sea to get to know one another. And I think those personal relationships made an enormous difference as well.

Christiane Amanpour (12:41)

And, you know, Castro learns, you know, that Khrushchev didn't consult him about all of this, and he's fuming. And then in your book, when the Cuban leader learned about the Kennedy Khrushchev deal over the wire services, he was apoplectic with rage, smashing a mirror in his home, and calling Khrushchev a son of a bitch, a bastard, and an asshole. And also, you write that Castro at one point thought, why can't I just launch a few nukes at the United States?

Thant Min U (13:08)

Yeah, I think with my grandfather, I mean, one of, you know, part of his style, or it was his temperament. Right. As well, that was so important. So he led not by being the loudest person in the room. I think he led by showing a kind of moral imagination, a kind of sense of what the others were thinking, listening, but also giving people a sense of what the other side's opinions, sensitivities, prejudices, feelings might be. And I think with Castro, he also had this calming presence that neither the Russians up until that point, let alone anybody else, was able to have. So I think he had a decisive influence on making sure that Castro didn't become the spoiler at a time when Kennedy and Khrushchev were finally coming together on a deal.

Christiane Amanpour (13:48)

And on page 76, you write, the United nations had, for the first time, mediated between the superpowers. So that was amazing. Which leads me to the next bit. So he had a good relationship with Kennedy. He started having a good relationship with LBJ Johnson after the assassination. But it all came a cropper over Vietnam.

Thant Min U (14:08)

Absolutely.

Christiane Amanpour (14:09)

Which Thant, your grandfather, you thant.

Werner Herzog (14:14)

Just.

Christiane Amanpour (14:14)

Didn'T believe was the right war, that the US could win, and that he saw that it was a war for reunification rather than a war of aggression and a sort of a Cold war domino.

Thant Min U (14:27)

Yeah, because I think even though he came from this, you know, remote town in Burma, he had had this amazing experience of living in a colonial country, of traveling the world, meeting all kinds of different people. So I think he could see something, even in 63, 64, that many people, Ivy League, educated American, top people in Washington, couldn't see, which was that they would lose the war and that what was important was a graceful exit from Vietnam that would retain American prestige, allow for peaceful reunification, and that this wouldn't be a threat to anyone, that the Vietnamese themselves didn't want to be under the domination of the Chinese or anyone else. I mean, he wanted the UN to have a role, and he had this enormous falling out with Lyndon Johnson over many years of. Of trying to convince him, but also then publicly challenging the president on Vietnam as well.

Christiane Amanpour (15:12)

So his prestige also started to diminish a little bit after that in some circles. In some circles, certainly in Western circles, because the reporters were busy writing about him as a, you know. You know, that he had overstepped his mark and that. What did he know? And this and that. But then with Nixon, it got even worse. Nixon and Kissinger. Because at one point there was a chance that Ho Chi Minh had agreed to something that you thant had proposed right around the peace issue and Kissinger essentially sabotaged it.

Thant Min U (15:44)

Well, in 64, there was a chance even under LBJ in the very beginning that the Americans could have done something. And I think what I've learned from my research is that I'm pretty sure that Johnson's top advisors didn't even tell him that this door was open at that time. And when Nixon took over, it was something very different. Because I think LBJ and his people like Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk. Dean Rusk especially didn't actually have anything against the UN per se. I mean, he was one of the founders of the UN by the time we got to Nixon and Kissinger, they purposely marginalized the un Wanted to work with it in a couple of different ways, but also, I think, wanted to drive political capital from bashing the UN in public as well.

Christiane Amanpour (16:23)

And they certainly did. And so did Ronald Reagan. Did especially got very exercised when China was admitted to the Security Council with all sorts of racist language from Ronald Reagan, which I'm actually not going to repeat. I want to ask you, you know, you start your book with the farewell ceremony for you Thant. He completed his two terms and very sadly though, he had cancer and he died several months later. I think you were only 8 when he died.

Thant Min U (16:51)

I was 8. He was in his mid-60s.

Christiane Amanpour (16:52)

Yeah, yeah. And he was very quick. But he did have a very interesting and fulsome farewell ceremony to which John and Yoko arrived without an invitation. Tell us how that went and why you wrote about it to start the book.

Thant Min U (17:08)

Yeah, I mean, in some ways it was a time, you know, as you mentioned, I mean, Vietnam War was still happening. It was a time of deep crises, but it was a time of actually a lot of hope as well, because all these countries had become decolonized. The UN was finally a global institution. It was still peacemaking in many different places. And it was a particular moment, I think, in New York history and then kind of the social history of that time because there were so many Americans who were very much supportive of the un There was a real internationalist spirit there as well. So at this party, you had hundreds of the kind of usual suspects, UN diplomats and officials. But you also had people involved like Jackie Kennedy, Thor Heyerdahl, Buckminster Fuller, Arnold Toynbee, Edmund Hillary, Pete Seeger was meant to do the music and he did and he sang. And then towards the very end, John Lennon passed him a little note. Pete Seeger gave him his guitar. And John Lennon said, I'm going to play everyone a song that you've probably never heard before, because I've never played it before in America. And he sang Imagine for the first time. And this was at the lunch for my grandfather's retirement, December 71.

Christiane Amanpour (18:13)

That's really amazing. That's really, really moving. So imagine, had you thant continued, had the UN still had the prestige that it did, had the Security Council not been always deadlocked in the last coup decades anyway, is the world still a better place for the UN does it still have a role? Trump questioned it at the Unger this year.

Thant Min U (18:36)

I think we have to respect the feeling, the wisdom of the people who founded the UN 80 years ago now. And these were men and women who in their adult lifetimes had lived through two world wars that killed 80 million plus people with a great depression in between. And they knew, they knew that we had to have something different. We couldn't go back to a world of just seeing strategic threats and arming ourselves and entering military alliances and all that. That might have a place to some extent, but they also built this architecture. And that architecture is now worn. It's been criticized. We've shown its or we know its failures as well as its successes. But I hope in my book what I show is that there is this missing piece. There was this time when the UN was actually successful and it was almost purposely undermined. And unless we go back to that history and understand exactly what happened, I think we'll be less able to imagine what's possible today.

Christiane Amanpour (19:31)

And interesting, you call it the untold story. In other words, the untold successes of the UN Ganth Mintoo, thank you very much indeed. Thanks very much and stay with us because we'll be right back after the break.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (19:49)

I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life podcast. More and more young people, people in their 40s, 30s, even 20s, are being diagnosed with cancers that used to be incredibly rare at those ages. It is something my guest, Dr. Kimmy Ng, has been seeing up close.

Claire Duffy (20:07)

It was shocking to see that a young person could be diagnosed with stage four disease.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (20:14)

Why is this happening and what can we do about it? Listen to Chasing Life streaming now, wherever you get your podcasts.

Christiane Amanpour (20:26)

Now we're firmly in the age of AI and when misinformation can spread like wildfire on the Internet, it seems what's real and what's true is constantly under dispute. That's the focus of Werner Herzog's new book, the Future of Truth. Herzog is, of course, the acclaimed German filmmaker who's made some of the most daring movies in history. His massive productions have taken him filming on the Amazon river and even crossing a jungle mountain with a 360 ton steamship. In this latest work, the much vaunted visionary argues that art and even lies can reveal an underlying truth. So what does that mean exactly? Well, I asked him when we spoke earlier this week. Werner Herzog, welcome to the program.

Werner Herzog (21:08)

Thank you.

Christiane Amanpour (21:09)

Um, I want to understand what you're saying in the Future of Truth because you are a writer, you're a film director, and a lot of what you do is about. What's the right word? Imagination and contextualizing truth. What do you mean? And what are you saying in this book?

Werner Herzog (21:32)

Well, it's a condensed book, but it has to do with my lifelong work and struggle with understanding what is truth. Because when you do a film in the background, there's always a question of truth lingering. And it's both in feature films and in documentaries. And by the way, it's also in writing. And it's everywhere in the arts. You have to deal with it in a way.

Christiane Amanpour (22:01)

And how do you deal with it? Because we live in a very febrile current moment where truth over the last few years has become weaponized. Many people say there's no such thing as truth. Others who don't like what people are saying say it's not true, it's fake news. So this book comes at a very sensitive time.

Werner Herzog (22:21)

I know that. Yes, but it's a coincidence. But we should not be somehow brought down that truth has a hard time nowadays. It is a historical phenomenon. We have fake news since the beginning of written documentation, Pharaonic times. We had after the suicide of the third Roman emperor, Nero, we had fake Neros all of a sudden showing up in northern Greece and Asia Minor. And we have had fake news throughout the ages. So it is nothing really new. However, since we have the Internet and tools of communication in an extraordinary way that we have never had before in history. Of course, fake news are spreading very, very fast and they are omnipresent. And by the way the blatant lies we have measured, it spread five times as fast as something that's true. It's very strange.

Christiane Amanpour (23:33)

I just want to ask you about what you just said, because you said, from the beginning of history, we've had fake news. And then you obviously Compare it to the unbelievable exponential spreading of it now because of technology. So are you hopeful for the concept of truth? You say we shouldn't worry because it's been a historical fact.

Werner Herzog (23:55)

Well, we have to bear in mind that it's nothing new. And of course my book ends with a very clear statement. All the chapters are 1012 pages long. The last chapter is called the Future of Truth and it's only two lines long and it says future. Truth has no future. But truth does not have a past either. But we will not, we must not, we cannot abandon the search for it. So we have to plow on. We have to look what we have at our disposal. The arsenal of things is in. The Internet, for example, is very, very fast. You can verify or corroborate important news. For example, I would immediately go to, not just to cnn, I would go to Al Jazeera, to the Vatican, to the Chinese news agency. And all of a sudden you have a much more nuanced image of what is going on.

Christiane Amanpour (25:05)

Let me ask you about your 1982 film Fitzcarraldo, which was an incredible undertaking and a lot of people are just fascinated by what you did to make that happen. It's the story of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald. He's an Irishman, attempted to transport a whole steamship over a mountain in the Peruvian jungle. He was a rubber baron and he wanted to fund an opera house there. So in the film you describe as having no clear separation between imagination and reality. And let's face it, you decided to haul that model of that ship all the way over that mountain and tell me about no clear separation and why you did that and didn't disassemble it or CGI it.

Werner Herzog (25:53)

Yeah, it's interesting that you say a model that I hauled. A model. No, it was a 360 ton monster. Yes, a real ship, a steamship in one piece. In the film itself, it's not for the sake of realism. It's like an event of grand opera, very strange. It transforms into something that we have in our imagination only. And I refused to have a plastic, little plastic boat hauled over a little hill at Botanic Garden in San Diego that was actually proposed by 20th century folks that were interested in it. And they said, ah, we have to do it in a good jungle. And I said, gentlemen, what do you mean by a good jungle? What is a bad jungle then? And they said they are the real jungle down in Peru at the Amazon. So we can't do it there. And I said, yes, I have to do it there. It cannot be a Botanical garden. It cannot be a plastic boat. And I moved it over the mountain. Of course, there is no real historical precedent in the history of technology that one piece of such magnitude was ever moved over a mountain. But I did it because I knew it was doable. It was dreaming big. But do the doable. That's what I keep preaching. And all of a sudden the real event translates into an event of pure fantasy. It's a very strange, very strange, inexplicable transformation.

Christiane Amanpour (27:36)

It is fascinating. Obviously, I saw the film a long, long time ago, and I'd love to hear how many people and how long it took. But I want to ask you this because since we're talking about truth and contextualizing, I read that the original. You know Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald. Did he not? I mean, he did this right in real life, but he disassembled the boat, the ship. So he actually did break it down. Yeah, but you didn't.

Werner Herzog (28:03)

We know very little about Brian Sweeney. It was actually Jose Fermin Fitzcarrald, an interesting rubber baron, a billionaire at his time. But he moved once a ship which was only 30 tons or so, had it disassembled, moved it across an isthmus in flat area and engineers reassembled it in the other river. But it's a regular, simple technical feat. Nothing special about it. But I always thought it was a very big metaphor that is dormant, sleeping inside of us. Collectively, the same way collectively, we have the white whale, the hunt for the white whales, dormant in us. Moby Dick. And because of that, I had the feeling it should be one ship, like a vision going over a mountain and then descending into another parallel river. It's a great metaphor and I know it, and I could articulate it. But they've asked me a metaphor for what? I can't even tell.

Christiane Amanpour (29:17)

Well, it was remarkable. Clearly, it stays with everybody who ever seen the film. But let me ask you about another example that you write about. In your book and in the chapter Kidnapped by Aliens, you write about the time you were acting in harmony Korine's film Mr. Lonely, you were acting as a priest. This was in 2007. And you say that you were approached by a man who insisted that you hear his actual confession. And you said his filmed confession to an actor playing a priest felt so much better than the real thing. So again, the sort of soft lines between reality and whatever.

Werner Herzog (29:58)

Yeah. There's also something in us to suspend disbelief. Sometimes we want to be cheated. We go to the magic show because we know everything is a technical trick. But we want to be enchanted. We go to WrestleMania. 10,000 people in a stadium. WrestleMania, everybody knows it is prearranged, fake fights. But the emotions, the collective emotions come across and they're always somehow truthful. And in case of me in a costume of a Catholic priest, I played a role in Harmony Corinne's film. And there was a young man in Panama on a little island, and he had a wilted flower, bunch of flowers in his hand. And I see him all day long and waiting for that one plane that would arrive. And I engaged him in conversation. What was he doing there? He was waiting for his wife to return. She had run away with her two children because he had cheated on her. And then he asked me, can I take his confession? And I made it very clear I'm not a priest. I'm playing a part in the film. The camera is out there. So he called the cameras in, confessed to me on camera, and he felt so much better than with a real priest. And that's stunning. And he said, and even on camera, and I had an inspiration. I told him, yeah, you must have fornicated with at least another woman. And he said, no, no, no, and wouldn't admit. And I had an inspiration. I said, you fornicated with at least five women at the same time? He said, yes, yes, it was like that. So, oh my goodness, can I say yes? But those are encounters with truth that have come throughout my life, in my work, all the time.

Christiane Amanpour (32:06)

Yeah. Well, let me ask you something, which I don't know how you feel about this, but. AI, right? AI in film, AI in art. So there's an AI generated actress, Tilly Norwood, that was recently introduced to Hollywood. So she's, you know, a 20 something year old character. She's been given social media profiles. Obviously there's been a lot of backlash. Unions, et cetera, talent agents, all the rest of it. Now, the producer created, who created it, said it's not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work, a piece of art. So what are your thoughts about this kind of AI and the future of your particular filmmaking?

Werner Herzog (32:48)

I have not seen the actress created by AI, but I'm not really interested. I think she, he, she or it will never be as lively as we are. Even we are separated now by an entire ocean and only through airwaves. And yet we have a real conversation. This actress in much of what I have seen, even a film scripted and created the images by AI, a short film, it's soulless, dead on arrival and only a reflection, a mimicry of the most common denominator. So my suspicion is that this young woman is some sort of a most common denominator of an actress or human beings. The same thing that you see sometimes in airplanes when you get safety instructions. And it's some sort of cartoon generated. Not human beings, but figures. It's like that in a way, yeah. Not interesting for me.

Christiane Amanpour (34:01)

I understand. It's something that kind of scares me. And your voice has been used by AI anyway to read certain. So it's a very real threat to some people in the arts and in public life. But I want to ask you something because you described something called ecstatic truth. And you've said. I have always insisted that you need stylization, invention, poetry and imagination to locate a deeper layer of truth. One that can access a distant echo of something that can illuminate us far beyond the reach of fact. What do you mean? And how have you done that?

Werner Herzog (34:35)

Well, nobody of us knows what truth is. We had A survey of 2000 philosophers and nobody could give a clear answer. So let's accept that. But somehow we have it in us to know there is something out there, roughly in this direction. There must be something like truth. And we have to struggle for it, we have to move for it. It's an endeavor, a voyage, It's a search. And when I speak of the ecstasy of truth, it's like late medieval mystics that step outside of their existence and they have insights, deeper insights about faith. Same thing in movies, for example, by introducing invention, stylization and certain things that all of a sudden point us away from pure facts into something deeper where we feel a resonance, something resonate, truth vaguely expressed like that. And I have one good example, Michelangelo, with his statue of the sculpture of Pieter. The Virgin Mary has Jesus in her arms. When you look at the face of Jesus, it's a tormented face of a 33 year old man taken from the cross. When you look at the face of Mary, his mother, the mother is maybe 15, maybe 17 years old. So does Michelangelo try to give us fake news? Does he cheat us? Does he lie to us? No, he does not. He modifies facts in such a way that we are understanding a deeper essence. Some sort of a truth of the Virgin and of the man of Sorrows.

Christiane Amanpour (36:35)

That is just such a beautiful way to end. I've obviously seen that statue many times and it's so moving and impressive and I really, I'm so happy to hear your, you know, your observation. I will look at it in a different way next time. Werner Herzog thank you very much indeed.

Werner Herzog (36:52)

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure.

Christiane Amanpour (36:55)

We'll be right back after this short break.

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Christiane Amanpour (37:41)

Next to a literary giant, Arundhati Roy is best known for her Booker Prize winning novel, the God of Small Things. She's also a prolific essayist focused on exposing the injustices and suffering of the world. But now she's turning inwards with the release of her memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me. Born from the flood of memories and feelings that were provoked by her mother's death, she lays out her fascinating story from childhood to the present, from Kerala to Delhi with Hari Srinivasan Christian.

Hari Srinivasan (38:12)

Thanks. Arundhati Roy, thanks so much for joining us. You have a recent memoir out called Mother Mary Comes to Me and it is about what? All I can say it's a tumultuous relationship between a woman and her mother. And for our audience that doesn't know your mom was a celebrated educator, she was an activist in her own right in India, you write. She was woven through it all, taller in my mind than any billboard, more perilous than any river in spate, more relentless than the rain, more present than the sea itself. Why write about this?

Arundhati Roy (38:49)

Well, I don't think any writer can answer that question really about almost any book. But honestly, for me it was just, it's just in every book I write, but I think especially in this book, book, it's almost like that's all I could do. I couldn't write, I couldn't do anything else until I wrote this, you know, because she was such an extraordinary person in, in good ways and bad. And I felt that a woman in that time, in that place who unleashed all of herself, you know, her darkness, her light, her genius, her cruelty, all of it. She deserved a place in literature, you know, sort of in a way where, you know, women are expected to be certain ways and especially mothers in India, you know.

Hari Srinivasan (39:44)

Yeah.

Arundhati Roy (39:45)

And on the other hand, they are vilified often in the West. And I just felt like, let's, let me see, as a challenge, can I, can I put this extraordinary person out as a writer without labels, without Wrapping it up without giving, you know, without sort of mitigating it in some way, because she was confounding. And I wanted to know whether I could share her with the world in that same confounding way, you know.

Hari Srinivasan (40:15)

You know, you describe in excruciating detail how, you know, she berates and insults you. She beats your brother with a ruler till it broke. She's a woman who shot and killed your dog, yet you describe being basically an external organ to her, inseparable and breathing your life into her. And I just found that, you know, really kind of just every few pages, I was going back and forth, like, why is she doing this? What to this woman?

Arundhati Roy (40:48)

I mean, that part you describe about it. She was a. I mean, when she left my father and she came down, back down south to South India, she was a very severe asthmatic. She couldn't. I was three years old, you know, and she would continuously be. And. And you could see it like life was just one minute here and the next minute maybe gone, and we would have nobody, you know. And later she would even say, so to me, I might die any minute, and what will you do? And where will you live? And. And that's when I was like, I'll breathe for you, you know, I'll be your external lung, you know. And it was just a sort of, you know, just a way of trying to make sure that that one person who was there for you wasn't going to leave. But then when I became a teenager and I went to Delhi and to School of Architecture, and I realized that I would survive on my own, and I stopped being that valiant organ child, as I call it, and that immediately, you know, she sensed that independence, and that sort of turned up the hostility a little bit. But, you know, I mean, those are terrible things she did. But also she did the most extraordinary things. I mean, I keep saying people who have passions, you know, people who are singers or poets or politicians, often have sort of very, very risky relationships with their children, with their own children, because of their calling. But my mother's calling was other people's children. You know, the school she started and the generations of students that she educated and put into the world. It's an extraordinary place. And for me, as obviously someone who survived, I mean, if I had fallen off the high wire, I might not have had this. I would not have had the same view of things. But since I did survive, I cannot but see the extraordinary parts of her, too, you know, and to me, that was the challenge. Can I present the Light and the darkness without kind of taking away from either.

Hari Srinivasan (43:04)

You write about your mom in a way that I think some people would really be startled with the types of things that she said to you. You write that her insults bored into me like a volley of bullets. My metaphoric execution ended with, you're a millstone around my neck. I should have dumped you in an orphanage the day you were born. I'd heard that many times before. It always made me feel drowsy, airless. I wanted to sleep for a long time. And I wonder if that sank into you, that feeling of maybe being worth less than or. And also to your brother, who suffered kind of differently. But when you went away to college, when did you figure out kind of your own identity was not those words that, you know, you were more than that?

Arundhati Roy (44:03)

You know, I actually. The thing is that. But I always could see. I don't know why, but I could always see her rage at me coming through when she was suffering something. You know, in. In this particular instance, she had put on so much weight and she had gone because of her steroids that she had to have her asthma, and she was in some. Some Ayurvedic resort or whatever, wherever that she was being starved, you know, and forcibly made to lose weight or the insults of the community around her. So I could see the process always, even from the time I was very young. So, I don't know. I mean, I can't say that I ever felt worthless because of the things that she didn't say to me, because I could just see that it was coming from some place of anger and it wasn't. I don't know, it. Somehow it didn't make me feel like, oh, I'm nothing. And I didn't feel. I don't remember feeling that, but I just remember feeling that I need to get away fast, you know, in order not to be destroyed, I need to get away fast. So I was a plotter. Like, I was plotting my escape all the time. I always got my eyes on the exits, you know.

Hari Srinivasan (45:27)

Yeah. You write also lovingly about the relationship that you had with your partner of both in work and in life, Pradeep and you met in his movie and Massey side. But, you know, eventually the relationship falls apart. And you said the price I paid for being Mother Mary's daughter and the writer that I am was not prison or persecution, although there was some of that, too. It was catastrophic heartbreak. What do you mean by that?

Arundhati Roy (45:57)

Well, what I mean is that after I wrote the God of Small Things, the God Of Small Things was written at a very crucial time in what was happening in India. You know, just as very soon after the book came out like it came out in 97. And by early 98 the right wing Hindu government had come to power. They did the nuclear test and I was this, you know, like I was just being paraded as this item of national pride and sort of Hindu national pride almost along with the nuclear tests and the Miss Universes and the whatever. And I realized that if I didn't say anything, I would just be considered part of this. And so I wrote this very big essay called the End of Imagination, which was about nationalism and nuclearism and Hindu nationalism and somehow foreseeing in some ways what was the situation in which we are now, you know, and from that I just, you know, I just became a person who had my eyes open to everything that was happening. And that home with Pradeep was a very privileged place. You know, it was a place of inheritance and comfort and it wasn't the life I had earlier with him because his parents had just died and he had inherited everything. And it was, I mean, it wasn't judgmental. I was not being judgmental, but I just knew that I couldn't live in there and be the writer that I was wanting to be, you know, the writer that I am, which is a little bit of a hooligan and a little bit of a, you know, person who's just walking, walking on the edge.

Hari Srinivasan (47:50)

Of things, you know, hooligan would be one way to describe it. But look, your activism has gotten you into plenty of hot water in India. It is something which as soon as they heard that part of your voice, they called you traitor. They said you should go off to Pakistan, right? I mean, I wonder if was that in a way liberating because you didn't have to live as the Arundhati Roy on billboards representing Indian writers of the future.

Arundhati Roy (48:20)

It was liberating because if I had. First of all, I must say that I don't think of myself ever as an activist. It was just what writers do and have done. But nowadays people want to say it's activism because literature is considered to be something tamer and less political or whatever. So I don't think of myself as an activist. But that political writing that I was doing really kicked me off that literary fairy princess, Booker Prize winning person. And yes, it was liberating because somehow from, from the time of my childhood, I've always dreaded being trapped in a space where I'm expected to be A certain way, you know, and here it just blew open that gilded cage forever, in a way. And I walked through the villages and towns and forests and slums of India, and I wrote what I had to write. And I never wrote it for approbation. It was almost the opposite, you know, a time when you did not have to be. I did not necessarily want to be that person who everybody agreed with or everybody felt comfortable with, because what was happening in this country was deeply, deeply disturbing at the time. And now it's far more slow.

Hari Srinivasan (49:41)

You know, I don't know the exact update, and if you haven't, please clarify. But are you still being held now in contempt of court in India for something you said years ago? And if this is the case, I mean, why do you feel it's still crucial for you to keep using your voice this way In India?

Arundhati Roy (50:03)

There are, yes, cases of contempt of court against me, but they sort of go into the freezer and then they, you know, just stay there. That's how the legal system works here. There isn't a case against me, but there's a permission to file a case against me, which is much more serious than contempt of court, but also something from years ago. But I don't know. You know, everybody's kind of caught in this sort of mesh of legal threats and police threats. Some people have been in prison for a long, long time, held as examples to other people. You know, comedians have been put into jail for jokes they almost made but didn't. You know, all sorts of people are in jail, activists in jail, lawyers are in jail, students are in jail. And all of it was glossed over by everybody because at that point, it seemed like this was a very robust economy and a very big market. And so let's just unsee the things that were going on with human beings.

Hari Srinivasan (51:15)

Bringing it back to your mom for a last question. Here you write about your mom. It says it was almost as though for her to shine her light on her students and give them all she had. We, he and I, that's your brother, had to absorb her darkness. Today, though, I'm grateful for that gift of darkness. I learned to keep it close, to map it, to sift through its shades, to stare at it until it gave up its secrets. It turned out to be a route to freedom, too. So explain how is that darkness a route to freedom?

Arundhati Roy (51:47)

Well, because you learn very early in life, you know, that it's not. It's not as if all of us are entitled to happiness and all these beautiful things. The world is a rough place, you know, and you have to find your way through it. And to me, I learned those lessons early, not just with her, but also in the years I spent in Delhi where I had nothing and no one and no money. And that was a great university for me. So I don't think that I could be the writer that I am if I had had another mother or another life. Of course, it depends on what you make of it, right? I mean, I could have gone down very easily, and then I would not be saying these things. I could have gone down, but I did not go down. I, I turned it into literature, into art, into real writing.

Hari Srinivasan (52:49)

You know, the memoir is beautifully written. It's called Mother Mary Comes to Me. Author Arundhati Roy, thanks so much for joining us.

Arundhati Roy (52:55)

You are so welcome.

Christiane Amanpour (52:58)

A reminder that behind so many literary geniuses is an extraordinary life and a rich tapestry of memories. That's it for now. If you ever miss our show, you can find the latest episode shortly after it airs on our podcast. And remember, you can always catch us online on our website and all over social media. Thank you for watching and goodbye. From London.

Arundhati Roy (53:23)

Foreign.

Claire Duffy (53:28)

I'm CNN tech reporter Claire Duffy. This week on the podcast Terms of Service, you may have noticed that tech platforms are increasingly trying to figure out how old you are. What's the deal with that? And should you be worried about handing over your information to these platforms to verify your age?

Unknown Tech Expert (53:45)

The Internet we have right now is mostly anonymous. When we talk about age verification, it completely destroys the idea of online anonymity. Data is something that you can sell. It is something that you can exchange. It is a commodity nowadays. And so when we're thinking about privacy, your data is something that you want to hold as close to your chest as possible.

Claire Duffy (54:04)

Listen to CNN's Terms of Service with me, Claire Duffy. Wherever you get your podcasts.