Re: Arundhati Roy on India and Its Maoists

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

So this means we can expect Roy to retire from writing and speaking  
and traveling around the world, and retiring to the Indian  
countryside to cultivate lentils?

Doug

On Apr 14, 2007, at 6:17 PM, ravi wrote:

> On 28 Mar, 2007, at 3:52 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote (quoting  
> Arundhati Roy):
> > 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.
>
>
> I have to say that as someone who has been unhappy with Roy in the  
> past, I am impressed by her words above. She is spot on, especially  
> in her last sentences, regarding the middle and upper classes,  
> which she quite appropriately coins a "secession". I see that her  
> association with Chomsky seems to have tightened up her prose,  
> which now reads like Chomsky with a shot of whiskey.
>
>        --ravi