And the I'm going to go and Good evening good afternoon good, wherever you are in the world because we know we have people here with us all over the world.

Greetings and welcome. My name is Rick Simonson. I work in a bookstore in Seattle called

Elliot Bay Book Company and on behalf of all the people who are staging this production

today, we are delighted to be celebrating the publication

of Arandari Roy's news book Azadi freedom fascism fiction and this is being published launched with her in New Delhi so she is in her evening hours and I'm in Seattle in where it's still a new day and Nick

Estes who I'll say more of it shortly is like an hour ahead of me and we know all of

you joining us are everywhere around the spectrum.

You may even be earlier in the morning than here and later in the night than it is in New

Delhi.

The publication of this book today is an auspicious one and first though to acknowledge and thank all the good work that Haymarket books, who is the books publisher, has done not only to make this occasion happen, but also in publishing

this book, Haymarket is a publisher based in Chicago in the U that has been around since 2001 and is dedicated to

social justice books and has done an amazing array of books and has been publishing coming along as several

of Arandotti Roy's non-fiction books that have come around these past 20 years and I'm not sure what all people are seeing this beforehand but you can

certainly go to hey market books.org and see what all they do and what and they have amazing books coming and others that they've done and books

particularly speaking to the moment we're in and so they are a huge part of why we're here today.

Also in Seattle, one of the other co-presenters of this day

is an organization called Tassveer. It's a South Asian arts

organization based with a strong social justice bent that has came about in 2002 in response to what was happening in the

U.S. in the wake of 9-11 and has done these ambitious South Asian film festivals

and now is increasingly doing literary festivals.

This year's versions of both will be online.

You can go to top spirit.org and see more of what they're about.

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