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.