You don’t have to be a genius to read the signs. We have a growing middle class, reared on a diet of radical consumerism and aggressive greed. Unlike industrializing Western countries, which had colonies from which to plunder resources and generate slave labor to feed this process, we have to colonize ourselves, our own nether parts. We’ve begun to eat our own limbs. Arundhati Roy on India, 3-25-07
Hard Rain Journal 4-18-07: India and the Dark Side of Globalization -- Thomas Friedman's Fairy Tales versus Arundhati Roy's Reality Tour
By Richard Power
Geopolitics and globalization are deep waters, with treacherous undercurrents. If you just listen to what you want to hear, you will drown.
Thomas Friedman was farcically deluded about the invasion and occupation of Iraq; and he is farcically deluded about what is going on India. I do not know if Friedman’s delusions are the result of a frightening naivety or a chilling cynicism. But either way they are dangerous. (For more on debunking Friedman, reading David Sirota's Billionaire Scion Tom Friedman and Open Letter to Tom Friedman is an excellent start.)
Arundathi Roy, on the other hand, saw the Bush-Cheney regime’s pre-emptive war in Iraq for what it was and where it would lead us all, and she has recently shared some troubling insights on where India really is and where it is really going.
I have not read much poetry or fiction in over the last two decades.
My early life was steeped in literature, but since the early 1990s, I have read only non-fiction, history and biography.
I have been engaging in a dynamic meditation on the nature of human suffering and ignorance, I have been exploring how the Four Noble Truths are mirrored in the contemporary world, and mapping out how the Eightfold Path winds through the great issues of our time.
So I didn’t attune to the voice of Arundhati Roy by way of her prize-winning, best-selling first novel, The God of Small Things.
I first heard the voice of Arundhati Roy in the furnace of post-9/11 dissent:
Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other's rhetoric. Each refers to the other as "the head of the snake". Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal political crimes. Both are dangerously armed - one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly hopeless. The fireball and the ice pick. The bludgeon and the axe. The important thing to keep in mind is that neither is an acceptable alternative to the other. Arundhati Roy, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Guardian, 9-29-01
In recent interviews with Tehelka (India’s on-line “People’s Paper”) and the Sydney Morning Herald, Roy, who is working on her second novel, exposes the dark side of globalization and its impact on India.
A clue about where Roy is heading may be gleaned from her current reading. On her coffee table rests a book by Bono, while at her bedside are works by the radical American founding father Thomas Paine and Victorian novelist Charles Dickens. What these two writers share is their defence of the French Revolution, and an empathy with the lower classes who pulled down the ruling elite. "In so many ways Paris then could be Delhi now. It is a conceit to think that all that we say is new and original."
Roy says India today, like pre-revolutionary France, is poised "on the edge of violence". As she sees it, the country of her birth is not coming together but coming apart - convulsed by "corporate globalisation" at an unprecedented, unacceptable velocity. "The inequalities become untenable." . . .
Unlike other Indian-born writers who have relocated to the US and Europe, Roy is determined to remain a thorn in the side of the establishment in India. "Here you see what's happening. People are driven out of villages, driven out of the cities, there's a kind of insanity in the air and all of it held down by our mesmeric, pelvic-thrusting Bollywood movies. The Indian middle class has just embarked on this orgy of consumerism."
But she admits that the kinds of non-violent protests she has taken part in for a decade have failed in India, a republic founded on the Gandhi-ite principles of peaceful resistance. "I am not such an uninhibited fan of Gandhi. After all, Gandhi was a superstar. When he went on a hunger strike he was a superstar on a hunger strike. But I don't believe in superstar politics. If people in a slum are on a hunger strike, no one gives a shit." Randeep Ramesh. The Sydney Morning Herald, 3-9-07
There is an atmosphere of growing violence across the country. How do you read the signs? In what context should it be read?
You don’t have to be a genius to read the signs. We have a growing middle class, reared on a diet of radical consumerism and aggressive greed. Unlike industrializing Western countries, which had colonies from which to plunder resources and generate slave labor to feed this process, we have to colonize ourselves, our own nether parts. We’ve begun to eat our own limbs. The greed that is being generated (and marketed as a value interchangeable with nationalism) can only be sated by grabbing land, water and resources from the vulnerable. What we’re witnessing is the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in independent India — the secession of the middle and upper classes from the rest of the country. It’s a vertical secession, not a lateral one. They’re fighting for the right to merge with the world’s elite somewhere up there in the stratosphere. They’ve managed to commandeer the resources, the coal, the minerals, the bauxite, the water and electricity. Now they want the land to make more cars, more bombs, more mines — supertoys for the new supercitizens of the new superpower. So it’s outright war, and people on both sides are choosing their weapons. The government and the corporations reach for structural adjustment, the World Bank, the ADB, FDI, friendly court orders, friendly policy makers, help from the ‘friendly’ corporate media and a police force that will ram all this down people’s throats. Those who want to resist this process have, until now, reached for dharnas, hunger strikes, satyagraha, the courts and what they thought was friendly media. But now more and more are reaching for guns. Will the violence grow? If the ‘growth rate’ and the Sensex are going to be the only barometers the government uses to measure progress and the well-being of people, then of course it will. How do I read the signs? It isn’t hard to read sky-writing. What it says up there, in big letters, is this: the shit has hit the fan, folks. Shoma Chaudhury interviews Arundhati Roy, Tehelka, 3-25-07
Richard Power is the founder of GS(3) Intelligence and http://www.wordsofpower.net. His work focuses on the inter-related issues of security, sustainability and spirit, and how to overcome the challenges of terrorism, cyber crime, global warming, health emergencies, natural disasters, etc. You can reach him via e-mail: richardpower@wordsofpower.net. For more information, go to www.wordsofpower.net
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