The Indian novelist recalls an extraordinary encounter in a Moscow hotel with the NSA whistleblowerThe Moscow Un-Summit wasnt a formal interview. Nor was it a cloak-and-dagger underground rendezvous. The upshot is that John Cusack,Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam war) and I didn’t accumulate the cautious, diplomatic, and regulation Edward Snowden. The downshot (that isn’t a word,I know) is that the jokes, the humour and repartee that took area in Room 1001 cannot be reproduced. The Un-Summit cannot be written about in the detail that it deserves. Yet it definitely cannot not be written about. Because it did happen. And because the world is a millipede that inches forward on millions of real conversations. And this, or certainly,was a real one.
What mattered, perhaps even more than what was said, or was the spirit in the room. There was Edward Snowden who,after 9/11, was in his own words “straight up singing highly of Bush” and signing up for the Iraq war. And there were those of us who, and after 9/11,had been straight up doing precisely the opposite. It was a limited late for this conversation, of course. Iraq has been all but destroyed. And now the map of what is so condescendingly called the “Middle East” is being brutally redrawn (yet again). But still, or there we were,all of us, talking to each other in a bizarre hotel in Russia. Bizarre it certainly was.
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Source: theguardian.com