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The Cost of Living
From the bestselling author of The God of Small Things comes a scathing and passionate indictment of big government's
disregard for the individual.
In her Booker Prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things , Arundhati Roy turned a compassionate but unrelenting eye on one family in India. Now she lavishes the same acrobatic language and fierce humanity on the future of her beloved country. In this spirited polemic, Roy dares to take on two of the great illusions of India's the massive dam projects that were supposed to haul this sprawling subcontinent into the modern age--but which instead have displaced untold millions--and the detonation of India's first nuclear bomb, with all its attendant Faustian bargains.
Merging her inimitable voice with a great moral outrage and imaginative sweep, Roy peels away the mask of democracy and prosperity to show the true costs hidden beneath. For those who have been mesmerized by her vision of India, here is a sketch, traced in fire, of its topsy-turvy society, where the lives of the many are sacrificed for the comforts of the few.
disregard for the individual.
In her Booker Prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things , Arundhati Roy turned a compassionate but unrelenting eye on one family in India. Now she lavishes the same acrobatic language and fierce humanity on the future of her beloved country. In this spirited polemic, Roy dares to take on two of the great illusions of India's the massive dam projects that were supposed to haul this sprawling subcontinent into the modern age--but which instead have displaced untold millions--and the detonation of India's first nuclear bomb, with all its attendant Faustian bargains.
Merging her inimitable voice with a great moral outrage and imaginative sweep, Roy peels away the mask of democracy and prosperity to show the true costs hidden beneath. For those who have been mesmerized by her vision of India, here is a sketch, traced in fire, of its topsy-turvy society, where the lives of the many are sacrificed for the comforts of the few.
144 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1999
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6047 people want to read
About the author
Arundhati Roy
99 books13.8k followersArundhati Roy is an Indian writer who is also an activist who focuses on issues related to social justice and economic inequality. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her novel, The God of Small Things, and has also written two screenplays and several collections of essays.
For her work as an activist she received the Cultural Freedom Prize awarded by the Lannan Foundation in 2002.
For her work as an activist she received the Cultural Freedom Prize awarded by the Lannan Foundation in 2002.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 128 reviews
January 3, 2008
This selection is a misnomer -- I picked up one-half of this book, a pamphlet called "The End of Imagination," in India in 2000. Roy's fiction has never really interested me; her work has always been trumped by Jhumpa Lahiri, a similar but more intriguing fictioneer. But Roy's polemics are breathtaking: She describes nuclear war -- and damns the Indian nuclear proliferation program -- in the most aggressive language I've ever read on the subject. She writes with the brutal conciseness of a quiet but outraged mother. She doesn't joke or exaggerate once; she states, with boiling simplicity, exactly how destructive a nuclear winter will be; and she adds, profoundly, that World War III will not only spell global genocide, but the annihilation of all our history and aspirations. The point of human existence will be moot; tens of thousands of years of evolution and development will mean nothing at all. Perhaps in spite of its bleakness, to know that this book was available in a Chennai bookstore is heartening. More heartening still: Salman Rushdie's novels were being sold in the same shop.
May 30, 2014
Dam(n)!
June 2, 2020
"My world has died and I want to mourn its passing."
Iconic, courageous, furious, blunt and gut wrenching amalgamation of social and political "truths"
"Did I hear someone say something about the world's biggest democracy?"
an eye opener account of: the never ending injustice of the rich against the poor; the powerful against the weak;
"Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers?"
the menace of nuclear weapons against the human civilisation; and the human greed against the survival of planet that we call home....
"This world of ours is 46,00 million years old.
It could end in one afternoon."
Roy is valiant, clear voiced, critical and fearless in her depiction of some of the darkest workings of the power structures prevalent in the modern world.
Iconic, courageous, furious, blunt and gut wrenching amalgamation of social and political "truths"
"Did I hear someone say something about the world's biggest democracy?"
an eye opener account of: the never ending injustice of the rich against the poor; the powerful against the weak;
"Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers?"
the menace of nuclear weapons against the human civilisation; and the human greed against the survival of planet that we call home....
"This world of ours is 46,00 million years old.
It could end in one afternoon."
Roy is valiant, clear voiced, critical and fearless in her depiction of some of the darkest workings of the power structures prevalent in the modern world.
June 16, 2024
I was blown away by the honesty and bravery of this women. I always remember a bit in the God of Small Things where Roy talks about the best stories being the ones “you can inhibit anywhere, where they smell like your lovers skin … and you know how they will end and yet you listen as though you don’t … you want to hear them again and again”. This was the same - i wanted to hear her words again and again. The book covers 2 essays that Roy wrote in around the late 90s.
The first one is about a massive dam that had now been built across a massive river called the Narmada in centralish India. Roy’s point is that the dam was pitched to the public as being this manna from heaven gift that would bring water to millions vie the series of canals that it would subsequently spawn and the way the dam could be used to drip feed water into the most required areas when the country was its most driest (i.e. any time outside the monsoon season when the country could rain relentlessly – Juneish to Septemberish). What the dam builders didn’t tell you was that the building of the dam and the subsequent canals would displace millions of mainly lower caste Dalit people and the aborigines of India known as the Adivasis. Roy was reeling off her success of the God of Small Things so was in an incredible position to influence and help these people which she eloquently does in the book and in this incredibly engaging documentary about the struggle of these poor people (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ2iV...). This may not seem like a huge issue to you as you are used to seeing dams but the point here was that the dam in question was one of over 3000 that was being built across this huge river. The best bits in this first essay about the Sardar Sarovar dam were:
• “To slow a beast you break its limbs. To slow a nation you break its people”
• Her writing style as you would expect from an international bestselling author was beautiful. The directness and simplicity with which she described what was happening in the book and the documentary was mesmerising.
The second essay came out shortly after the nuclear knob waving that was going on between India and Pakistan in the late 1990s. This essay is called end of the imagination and is a direct diatribe against the childishness with which India would on the one hand castigate the way India was blindly following western ideals like holly wood, coke and McDonalds and yet on the other hand India was blindly copying and religiously proud of the nuclear arms they had acquired and tested. Feeling proud of the bomb was akin to feeling proud of being Hindu in India and feeling uber-nationalistic. It was this nationalism that Roy talks about and worries about in this essay.
Here are some of the best bits from this second essay:
• “To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
• “If protesting against having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain is anti-Hindu and anti-national, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic. I am a citizen of the earth. I own no territory. I have no flag. My policies are simple. I'm willing to sign any nuclear non-proliferation treaty or nuclear test ban treaty that's going. Immigrants are welcome. You can help me design our flag.”
• This was a stunning and simple attack against all the shite the west has done in the world. yes its done a lot of good but here’s its shite summarised in a few simple and direct sentences: “As for the third Official Reason: exposing Western Hypocrisy - how much more exposed can they be? Which decent human being on earth harbours any illusions about it? These are people whose histories are spongy with the blood of others. Colonialism, apartheid, slavery, ethnic cleansing, germ warfare, chemical weapons - they virtually invented it all. They have plundered nations, snuffed out civilisations, exterminated entire populations. They stand on the worlds stage stark naked but entirely unembarrassed, because they know that they have more money, more food and bigger bombs than anybody else.”
• “The nuclear bomb is the most anti-democratic, anti-national, anti-human, outright evil thing that man has ever made. If you are religious, then remember that this bomb is Man's challenge to God. It's worded quite simply: We have the power to destroy everything that You have created. If you're not religious, then look at it this way. This world of ours is four thousand, six hundred million years old. It could end in an afternoon.”
The first one is about a massive dam that had now been built across a massive river called the Narmada in centralish India. Roy’s point is that the dam was pitched to the public as being this manna from heaven gift that would bring water to millions vie the series of canals that it would subsequently spawn and the way the dam could be used to drip feed water into the most required areas when the country was its most driest (i.e. any time outside the monsoon season when the country could rain relentlessly – Juneish to Septemberish). What the dam builders didn’t tell you was that the building of the dam and the subsequent canals would displace millions of mainly lower caste Dalit people and the aborigines of India known as the Adivasis. Roy was reeling off her success of the God of Small Things so was in an incredible position to influence and help these people which she eloquently does in the book and in this incredibly engaging documentary about the struggle of these poor people (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ2iV...). This may not seem like a huge issue to you as you are used to seeing dams but the point here was that the dam in question was one of over 3000 that was being built across this huge river. The best bits in this first essay about the Sardar Sarovar dam were:
• “To slow a beast you break its limbs. To slow a nation you break its people”
• Her writing style as you would expect from an international bestselling author was beautiful. The directness and simplicity with which she described what was happening in the book and the documentary was mesmerising.
The second essay came out shortly after the nuclear knob waving that was going on between India and Pakistan in the late 1990s. This essay is called end of the imagination and is a direct diatribe against the childishness with which India would on the one hand castigate the way India was blindly following western ideals like holly wood, coke and McDonalds and yet on the other hand India was blindly copying and religiously proud of the nuclear arms they had acquired and tested. Feeling proud of the bomb was akin to feeling proud of being Hindu in India and feeling uber-nationalistic. It was this nationalism that Roy talks about and worries about in this essay.
Here are some of the best bits from this second essay:
• “To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
• “If protesting against having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain is anti-Hindu and anti-national, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic. I am a citizen of the earth. I own no territory. I have no flag. My policies are simple. I'm willing to sign any nuclear non-proliferation treaty or nuclear test ban treaty that's going. Immigrants are welcome. You can help me design our flag.”
• This was a stunning and simple attack against all the shite the west has done in the world. yes its done a lot of good but here’s its shite summarised in a few simple and direct sentences: “As for the third Official Reason: exposing Western Hypocrisy - how much more exposed can they be? Which decent human being on earth harbours any illusions about it? These are people whose histories are spongy with the blood of others. Colonialism, apartheid, slavery, ethnic cleansing, germ warfare, chemical weapons - they virtually invented it all. They have plundered nations, snuffed out civilisations, exterminated entire populations. They stand on the worlds stage stark naked but entirely unembarrassed, because they know that they have more money, more food and bigger bombs than anybody else.”
• “The nuclear bomb is the most anti-democratic, anti-national, anti-human, outright evil thing that man has ever made. If you are religious, then remember that this bomb is Man's challenge to God. It's worded quite simply: We have the power to destroy everything that You have created. If you're not religious, then look at it this way. This world of ours is four thousand, six hundred million years old. It could end in an afternoon.”
September 8, 2021
By happy coincidence, a friend of mine lent me this book right as I was in the middle of another - James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, a collection of case studies on the disasters of 20th century state planning. Coincidence because Arundhati Roy’s The Cost of Living may well have fit as yet another chapter in that book; Happy because of the exhilaration of the read, at once engrossing and distressing. The comparison is a disservice though. Where Scott is scholarly and measured, Roy is passionate and partisan: the India she writes of is her India, and she speaks as an insider to it, no less a champion for it. To bear witness, as much as to inform is the goal here, and oh, what witnessing there is to have borne.
Comprised of what are effectively two pamphlets - one on the construction of the gigantic Sardar Sarovar dam in Northwest India, the other on the occasion of the country's successful 1998 nuclear tests - The Cost of Living bristles with a rage tempered - only just - by the cutting gracefulness of Roy’s pen. The essays here are aphoristic; disjunct paragraphs of facts and vignettes splayed about one after the other, with single-line sentences and dangling words lopping off passages for punchy effect. While the stamp of the twenty year distance from its publication date makes itself felt every now and then, Roy’s ability is just in telescoping the issues discussed into the glare of the present, reminding us that these then-regional, now-historical issues are anything but.
Take what she says on nuclear bombs for instance: “It is such supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they’re used. The fact that they exist at all, their very presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to imagine. [They] pervade our thinking. Control our behaviour. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks in the base of our brains”. First - gorgeous and terrifying. Second - it’s true right? In the face of ecological collapse, global pandemics, and economic immiseration, doesn't the bomb’s looming and unconscious presence decisively shape how and to what extent we can respond to it all? At the very least, the provocation ought to prick.
As for the essay on Sardar Sarovar - in fact, the much larger of the two included here - well in truth, anyone in the global South will have heard, if not this story, than one like it before. A conjunction of predatory international finance, the greed of local agribusiness, and a government intent on a Big Shiny Infrastructure project, all the better to identify with the Nation itself. In the words of (India's first Prime Minister) Jawaharlal Nehru, "Dams are the temples of modern India". And the price of worship? Villages displaced, soils silted, forests flooded, crops claimed - all in all, lives sunk. At least 50 million of them, by Roy's modest calculations (just... linger on that figure a minute). And yet The Cost of Living still stands as singular testimony nonetheless. Not only as a model and harbinger of things yet to come, but as a witness statement that still dares us to honor it with an alternative future.
A Note: the two essays here are also collected in Roy's The Algebra of Infinite Justice. One would probably do better to pick that up, insofar as it includes a bunch of Roy's other contemporaneous writing. I just happened to have been given this particular book.
Comprised of what are effectively two pamphlets - one on the construction of the gigantic Sardar Sarovar dam in Northwest India, the other on the occasion of the country's successful 1998 nuclear tests - The Cost of Living bristles with a rage tempered - only just - by the cutting gracefulness of Roy’s pen. The essays here are aphoristic; disjunct paragraphs of facts and vignettes splayed about one after the other, with single-line sentences and dangling words lopping off passages for punchy effect. While the stamp of the twenty year distance from its publication date makes itself felt every now and then, Roy’s ability is just in telescoping the issues discussed into the glare of the present, reminding us that these then-regional, now-historical issues are anything but.
Take what she says on nuclear bombs for instance: “It is such supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they’re used. The fact that they exist at all, their very presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to imagine. [They] pervade our thinking. Control our behaviour. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks in the base of our brains”. First - gorgeous and terrifying. Second - it’s true right? In the face of ecological collapse, global pandemics, and economic immiseration, doesn't the bomb’s looming and unconscious presence decisively shape how and to what extent we can respond to it all? At the very least, the provocation ought to prick.
As for the essay on Sardar Sarovar - in fact, the much larger of the two included here - well in truth, anyone in the global South will have heard, if not this story, than one like it before. A conjunction of predatory international finance, the greed of local agribusiness, and a government intent on a Big Shiny Infrastructure project, all the better to identify with the Nation itself. In the words of (India's first Prime Minister) Jawaharlal Nehru, "Dams are the temples of modern India". And the price of worship? Villages displaced, soils silted, forests flooded, crops claimed - all in all, lives sunk. At least 50 million of them, by Roy's modest calculations (just... linger on that figure a minute). And yet The Cost of Living still stands as singular testimony nonetheless. Not only as a model and harbinger of things yet to come, but as a witness statement that still dares us to honor it with an alternative future.
A Note: the two essays here are also collected in Roy's The Algebra of Infinite Justice. One would probably do better to pick that up, insofar as it includes a bunch of Roy's other contemporaneous writing. I just happened to have been given this particular book.
June 6, 2023
This book compiles 2 of Roy’s earliest articles:
1998 “The End of Imagination” (on India’s nuclear weapons)
1999 “The Greater Common Good” (on India’s mega dams, esp. Sardar Sarovar)
The Good:
--The rating and review here are for the essay “The End of Imagination”, which exposes the civilizational end of social imagination with India’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, and the fallacious reasons given (i.e. nuclear deterrence). While this is an eloquent start to a crisis that has faded from public discourse (i.e. nuclear proliferation), several contextual points would broaden understanding (see below).
--I review the other essay here: The Greater Common Good
The Missing:
--Expanding beyond the Indian state:
1) India’s previous social imagination was reflected in its prominent role in the Non-Aligned Movement, which had a principle of global disarmament. The era of decolonization was a moment of incredible global possibilities; see Vijay Prashad’s The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World.
2) The sad turn away from this came about as the Non-Aligned Movement/Third World project collapsed, and India’s hypocrisy in getting nuclear weapons while assisting the imperialist West in isolating Iran (who was actually part of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, with international inspections). More from the fabulous Vijay Prashad:
-summary of India-Iran: https://youtu.be/Tgphk_jDuE4?t=1513
-details of India-Iran: https://youtu.be/nATHmWl6uYg?t=221
-anti-colonialism eroding to cruel cultural nationalism: https://youtu.be/R6PnB7bnLFY?t=231
3) The ultimate driver of nuclear proliferation is regime change, especially since the Soviet Bloc collapsed. Iraq’s weaponry and overall State was deteriorating, making it a softer target. Gaddafi gave up his nuclear program in a gesture to open markets and now Libya is a leveled, failed state.
-ex. ideological censorship hiding North Korea’s experience after being labelled a “rogue state”/“Axis of Evil” and the annihilation of fellow “Axis of Evil” Iraq, and then Libya: https://youtu.be/6jKcsHv3c74
1998 “The End of Imagination” (on India’s nuclear weapons)
1999 “The Greater Common Good” (on India’s mega dams, esp. Sardar Sarovar)
The Good:
--The rating and review here are for the essay “The End of Imagination”, which exposes the civilizational end of social imagination with India’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, and the fallacious reasons given (i.e. nuclear deterrence). While this is an eloquent start to a crisis that has faded from public discourse (i.e. nuclear proliferation), several contextual points would broaden understanding (see below).
--I review the other essay here: The Greater Common Good
The Missing:
--Expanding beyond the Indian state:
1) India’s previous social imagination was reflected in its prominent role in the Non-Aligned Movement, which had a principle of global disarmament. The era of decolonization was a moment of incredible global possibilities; see Vijay Prashad’s The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World.
2) The sad turn away from this came about as the Non-Aligned Movement/Third World project collapsed, and India’s hypocrisy in getting nuclear weapons while assisting the imperialist West in isolating Iran (who was actually part of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, with international inspections). More from the fabulous Vijay Prashad:
-summary of India-Iran: https://youtu.be/Tgphk_jDuE4?t=1513
-details of India-Iran: https://youtu.be/nATHmWl6uYg?t=221
-anti-colonialism eroding to cruel cultural nationalism: https://youtu.be/R6PnB7bnLFY?t=231
3) The ultimate driver of nuclear proliferation is regime change, especially since the Soviet Bloc collapsed. Iraq’s weaponry and overall State was deteriorating, making it a softer target. Gaddafi gave up his nuclear program in a gesture to open markets and now Libya is a leveled, failed state.
-ex. ideological censorship hiding North Korea’s experience after being labelled a “rogue state”/“Axis of Evil” and the annihilation of fellow “Axis of Evil” Iraq, and then Libya: https://youtu.be/6jKcsHv3c74
July 22, 2014
Talk about serendipity: this book fell into my hands just when I finished two EdX e-courses, the Australian National University introductory course to India (Engaging India) and the University of Delft Next generation infrastructures and somehow neatly bridged them.
The first essay, The Greatest Common Good, is a thought provoking attack on the politics underlying building the Sardar Sarovar dam in particular and "Big Dam" infrastructures in India in general . Roy estimates that between thirty three and fifty million people have been displaced by the building of big dams in India during the first fifty years of its independence. To put this huge number in perspective, she mentions that, at the time she wrote this, this was three times the population of Australia and three times the number of refugees created by Britain´s partition of India and Pakistan. She delves, skeptically, into the claims made for dams as means to development, their conflicting objectives, the role of the World Bank,
This essay should be obligatory reading for all those involved in any massive infrastructure project, so that they get a feel for its true human and environmental costs and not get carried away by technological optimism.
The second essay, The End of Imagination, is a searing indictment of India´s astonishing volte face, as it turned from abstaining from developing nuclear weapons and thus enjoying the moral high ground necessary to be a leading and shining light in the nuclear antiproliferation movement to becoming a nuclear power (India exploded her first nuclear bomb in 1998 and in 2013 became the first non-permanente member of the five country UN Security Council to launch a nuclear-powered submarine). The essay is also a fascinating glimpse into the problem of defining an Indian national identity -and by extension any one national identity in times when chauvinism again seems to be on the rise- supposing one were needed:
The first essay, The Greatest Common Good, is a thought provoking attack on the politics underlying building the Sardar Sarovar dam in particular and "Big Dam" infrastructures in India in general . Roy estimates that between thirty three and fifty million people have been displaced by the building of big dams in India during the first fifty years of its independence. To put this huge number in perspective, she mentions that, at the time she wrote this, this was three times the population of Australia and three times the number of refugees created by Britain´s partition of India and Pakistan. She delves, skeptically, into the claims made for dams as means to development, their conflicting objectives, the role of the World Bank,
India is in a situation today where it pays back more money to the Bank in interest and repayment instalments than it receives from it. We are forced to incur new debts in order to repay our old ones. According to the World Bank Annual Report, last year (1998), India paid the Bank $478 million more than it borrowed. Over the last five years (1993 to 1998) India paid the Bank $1.475 billion more than it received.pointedly analyzing who winds up getting the contracts and the benefits of such huge infrastructure projects, how the environmental impact studies done for the project were sorely inadequate, how poorly the people being displaced were compensated for the loss of their communities and livelihoods and how some government officials resort to bullying or worse:
We will request you to move from your houses after the dam comes up. If you move, it will be good. Otherwise we shall release the waters and drown you all.Popular outcry managed to suspend the Sardar Sarovar dam for several years, but as Arudhati Roy correctly foretold, the project was later slowly but inexhorably carried out to completion.
[Morarji Desai, speaking at a public meeting in the submergence zone of the Pong dam in 1961]
This essay should be obligatory reading for all those involved in any massive infrastructure project, so that they get a feel for its true human and environmental costs and not get carried away by technological optimism.
The second essay, The End of Imagination, is a searing indictment of India´s astonishing volte face, as it turned from abstaining from developing nuclear weapons and thus enjoying the moral high ground necessary to be a leading and shining light in the nuclear antiproliferation movement to becoming a nuclear power (India exploded her first nuclear bomb in 1998 and in 2013 became the first non-permanente member of the five country UN Security Council to launch a nuclear-powered submarine). The essay is also a fascinating glimpse into the problem of defining an Indian national identity -and by extension any one national identity in times when chauvinism again seems to be on the rise- supposing one were needed:
The people who have a vital stake (or more to the point, a business interest) in India´s having a single, lucid, cohesive national identity are the politicians who constitute our national political parties. The reason isn´t far to seek, it´s simply because their struggle, their career goal, is -and necessarily must be- to become that identity.Arhundhati Roy is a skillful polemicist, a gadfly who asks sharp and honest questions which need to be deeply considered and not merely brushed aside in the name of expediency and "progress". She is particularly wary of the behemoth of mind-numbing State power, even in countries which cloak themselves in democratic institutions:
[...]There´s no such thing as an Authentic India or a Real Indian. There is no Divine Committee that has the right to sanction one single, authorized version of what India is, or should be. There is no one religion or language or caste or region or person or story or book that can claim to be its sole representative. There are, and can only be, visions of India, various ways of seeing it -honest, dishonest, wonderful, absurd, modern, traditional, male, female. They can be argued over, criticized, praised, scorned, but not banned or broken. Not hunted down.
To slow a nation, you break its people. You rob them of volition. You demonstrate your absolute command over their destiny. You make it clear that ultimately it falls to you to decide who lives and who dies, who prospers and who doesn´t. To exhibit your capability you show off all that you can do, and how easily you can do it. How easily you could press a button and anhilate the earth. How you can start a war or sue for peace. How you can snatch a river away from one and gift it to another. How you can green a desert, or fell a forest and plant one somewhere else. You use caprice to fracture a people´s faith in ancient things -earth, forest, water, air.This is what Roy writes against, because she believes that:
Once that´s done, what do they have left? Only you. They will turn to you, because you´re all they have. They will love you even while they despise you. They will trust you even though they know you well. They will vote for you even as you squeeze the very breath their bodies. They will drink what you give them to drink. They will breathe what you give them to breathe.
[Big dams and nuclear bombs] are both weapons of mass destruction. They´re both weapons governments use to control their own people.Well worth reading.
February 5, 2017
I’ve never really been a fan or follower of patriotism. What is a nation? Who creates it? Why do I need to champion one patch of soil and rock over another? In Cost of Living, Arundhati Roy expands on two ways the very ideas of state and patriotism that we value so highly as a society are not only false. But run contrary to our sense of community and humanity.
The first essay ‘Greater Common Good’ examines the way in which dams were used across India to create and manufacture public poverty and displacement at a scale of millions. On the other end creating private profits, monopolies and power for a small wealthy elite. All of which was pedalled under the rhetoric of it being for the greater common good of India. Only that common good was reserved for a few, at the expense of the illiterate and marginalised villagers in places like Gujarat.
The second essay ‘The End of Imagination’ focuses on the fallacious use of nuclear weapons as an affirmation of statehood, identity and defense. The false pretext under which is was celebrated as a win for India, the country that broke from the phantom of the western powers.
Here are my favourite quotes and insights from my journey into this book:
* ‘The government of India has detailed figures for how many million tonnes of food grain or edible oils the country produces...but the Government of India does not have a figure for the number of people that have been displaced by dams… at the altars of ‘National Progress’...50 million people’
* ‘The World Bank ‘s management submitted 6000 projects to the Executive board. The board hasn’t turned down a single one… Terms like ‘Moving Money’... suddenly begin to make sense.
‘India is in a situation today [1999] where it pays back more money to The Bank in interest and repayment instalments than it receives from it. We are forced to incur new debts in order to be able to repay our old ones.’
* ‘The International Dam Industry is worth $20 billion a year. If you follow the trails of Big Dams the world over, where ever you go - China, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Brazil, Guatemala - you’ll rub up against the same story’
* The story of how on Christmas Day in 1990, 6000 men and women walked over 1000km in protest to one such dam building project. They had their hands bound together to show they were doing so peacefully. But still they were beaten, arrested and dragged and then driven off some miles away in the wild. And even then, they simply walked back and began all over again. Orwell's words in 1984, the boot stamping on a human face - forever - came to my mind.
* 'The state never tires, never ages, never needs a rest. It runs an endless relay. But fighting people tire. They fall ill, they grow old'
* 'When the waters recede they leave ruin...People never stop growing things that they can afford to eat, and start growing things that they can only afford to sell. By linking themselves to the 'market' they lose control over their lives...Even if the market holds out, the soil doesn't'.
* 'David Hopper, the World Bank's vice-president for South Asia, has admitted that The Bank does not usually include the cost of drainage in its irrigation...because irrigation projects with adequate drainage are just too expensive... it makes the cost of a complete Project appear unviable'
* 'Of the 1 billion people in the world who have no access to safe drinking water, 855 million live in rural areas. This is because the cost of installing an energy-intensive network of thousands of kilometres of pipelines, aqueducts, pumps and treatment plants... Nobody can afford to'
* 'The only dream worth having, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die when you're dead... To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. An never, never to forget.'
* ' Fascism is as much about people as about governments... The bomb is India. India is the bomb. Not just India, Hindu India. Therefore, be warned, any criticism of it is not just anti-national, but anti-Hindu...That's the great thing about all religious texts. You can find anything you want in them - as long as you know what you're looking for'
* 'The original inhabitants of this land were not Hindu...India's Adivasi people have a greater claim to being indigenous than anybody else, and how have they been treated by the State and its minions?
The first essay ‘Greater Common Good’ examines the way in which dams were used across India to create and manufacture public poverty and displacement at a scale of millions. On the other end creating private profits, monopolies and power for a small wealthy elite. All of which was pedalled under the rhetoric of it being for the greater common good of India. Only that common good was reserved for a few, at the expense of the illiterate and marginalised villagers in places like Gujarat.
The second essay ‘The End of Imagination’ focuses on the fallacious use of nuclear weapons as an affirmation of statehood, identity and defense. The false pretext under which is was celebrated as a win for India, the country that broke from the phantom of the western powers.
Here are my favourite quotes and insights from my journey into this book:
* ‘The government of India has detailed figures for how many million tonnes of food grain or edible oils the country produces...but the Government of India does not have a figure for the number of people that have been displaced by dams… at the altars of ‘National Progress’...50 million people’
* ‘The World Bank ‘s management submitted 6000 projects to the Executive board. The board hasn’t turned down a single one… Terms like ‘Moving Money’... suddenly begin to make sense.
‘India is in a situation today [1999] where it pays back more money to The Bank in interest and repayment instalments than it receives from it. We are forced to incur new debts in order to be able to repay our old ones.’
* ‘The International Dam Industry is worth $20 billion a year. If you follow the trails of Big Dams the world over, where ever you go - China, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Brazil, Guatemala - you’ll rub up against the same story’
* The story of how on Christmas Day in 1990, 6000 men and women walked over 1000km in protest to one such dam building project. They had their hands bound together to show they were doing so peacefully. But still they were beaten, arrested and dragged and then driven off some miles away in the wild. And even then, they simply walked back and began all over again. Orwell's words in 1984, the boot stamping on a human face - forever - came to my mind.
* 'The state never tires, never ages, never needs a rest. It runs an endless relay. But fighting people tire. They fall ill, they grow old'
* 'When the waters recede they leave ruin...People never stop growing things that they can afford to eat, and start growing things that they can only afford to sell. By linking themselves to the 'market' they lose control over their lives...Even if the market holds out, the soil doesn't'.
* 'David Hopper, the World Bank's vice-president for South Asia, has admitted that The Bank does not usually include the cost of drainage in its irrigation...because irrigation projects with adequate drainage are just too expensive... it makes the cost of a complete Project appear unviable'
* 'Of the 1 billion people in the world who have no access to safe drinking water, 855 million live in rural areas. This is because the cost of installing an energy-intensive network of thousands of kilometres of pipelines, aqueducts, pumps and treatment plants... Nobody can afford to'
* 'The only dream worth having, is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die when you're dead... To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. An never, never to forget.'
* ' Fascism is as much about people as about governments... The bomb is India. India is the bomb. Not just India, Hindu India. Therefore, be warned, any criticism of it is not just anti-national, but anti-Hindu...That's the great thing about all religious texts. You can find anything you want in them - as long as you know what you're looking for'
* 'The original inhabitants of this land were not Hindu...India's Adivasi people have a greater claim to being indigenous than anybody else, and how have they been treated by the State and its minions?
March 6, 2009
This is "make your blood boil" journalism by the author of The God of Small Things, which I loved. Brought to my attention by my sometimes radicalized family, Arundhati Roy's book consists of essays on India's gigantic dam projects, and on the advent of the Indian nuclear bomb.
Roy describes the displacement of thousands of Adivasis (indiginous southern Indians) resulting from huge dam projects sponsored with inadequate planning by the World Bank. It is an outrageous example of the alienation of government from its people, and puts me at a loss as to how to have some impact on it. I have, however, been googling news items which describe Roy's encounters with Indian authorities. She is, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an independent government of one, and a conscience to her nation.
Roy describes the displacement of thousands of Adivasis (indiginous southern Indians) resulting from huge dam projects sponsored with inadequate planning by the World Bank. It is an outrageous example of the alienation of government from its people, and puts me at a loss as to how to have some impact on it. I have, however, been googling news items which describe Roy's encounters with Indian authorities. She is, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an independent government of one, and a conscience to her nation.
June 12, 2011
How much would you sacrifice for your standard of living? How many other people have to suffer for your comforts?
May 16, 2018
“There is beauty yet in this brutal, damaged world of ours."
3.5 stars. This is a book of two essays on India, published in 1999. These essays are intended to scare you out of complacency. They are not warm, and they are not comforting. They lay bare the horrors of humanity while somehow still making you want to protect humanity all the more.
Roy's first essay speaks about the Narmada Dam in India, which is perhaps old news but contains familiar themes — governments and people doubling down on what has been shown to be a damaging or untrue belief, exploitation of the lower class (or caste) for profit, questionable moral codes, and the ongoing exploitation of our world’s resources.
It’s easy to see how skilled writers like Roy make the written word their weapon. In her war against the Indian government’s actions, she crafts a dam(n)ing picture of millions of displaced Indians, irresponsible environmental impact, and decisions made purely for money and politics - not to mention questionable acts of "International Aid" given by the World Bank and first world countries.
The second essay shares Roy’s viewpoint on India’s development of the nuclear bomb. She rails against it, emphasizing that the nuclear bomb does not have to be used to be damaging. It causes enough damage to the human psyche purely by existing.
Roy has a tendency to be hyperbolic and make frequent appeals to fear, especially in the second essay, which kept me from truly connecting to the book. That said, these essays contain a lot of interesting information about India's history along with one of my all-time favourite quotes (which, incidentally, is the reason I picked this book up in the first place). That, alone, made it a worthwhile read.
"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget."
3.5 stars. This is a book of two essays on India, published in 1999. These essays are intended to scare you out of complacency. They are not warm, and they are not comforting. They lay bare the horrors of humanity while somehow still making you want to protect humanity all the more.
Roy's first essay speaks about the Narmada Dam in India, which is perhaps old news but contains familiar themes — governments and people doubling down on what has been shown to be a damaging or untrue belief, exploitation of the lower class (or caste) for profit, questionable moral codes, and the ongoing exploitation of our world’s resources.
It’s easy to see how skilled writers like Roy make the written word their weapon. In her war against the Indian government’s actions, she crafts a dam(n)ing picture of millions of displaced Indians, irresponsible environmental impact, and decisions made purely for money and politics - not to mention questionable acts of "International Aid" given by the World Bank and first world countries.
The second essay shares Roy’s viewpoint on India’s development of the nuclear bomb. She rails against it, emphasizing that the nuclear bomb does not have to be used to be damaging. It causes enough damage to the human psyche purely by existing.
Roy has a tendency to be hyperbolic and make frequent appeals to fear, especially in the second essay, which kept me from truly connecting to the book. That said, these essays contain a lot of interesting information about India's history along with one of my all-time favourite quotes (which, incidentally, is the reason I picked this book up in the first place). That, alone, made it a worthwhile read.
"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget."
July 25, 2013
Definitely a perspective altering book. Must read for those interested in fields of Sustainability Studies, Human Rights, Cosmopolitan Exploitation of Land and People, Indian Solidarity Movements, Economic Inequalities and Third World Feminism. Very powerful.
Her point on nuclear weapons in The End of Imagination chapter is something everyone (not just International Relations, Politics, Political Science, etc major) should read.
June 13, 2019
Iνδία, η χώρα με τα 3.200 υδατοφρ��γματα και με τους 50 εκατομμύρια αστέγους και πένητες.
November 11, 2024
Only read two chapters/essays for a University class, The greater common good and the End of Imagination. Both of them were very interesting and instructive, it taught me new things about the dam problem in India and the general fear of nuclear war.
Arundhati Roy writes this extremely well, we can definitely feel her rage and frustration in the text.
I might read the full novel at some point.
And a small quote that I think will stay with me for a moment:
« This world of ours is four thousand, six hundred million years old.
It could end in an afternoon. » p.93
Arundhati Roy writes this extremely well, we can definitely feel her rage and frustration in the text.
I might read the full novel at some point.
And a small quote that I think will stay with me for a moment:
« This world of ours is four thousand, six hundred million years old.
It could end in an afternoon. » p.93
July 13, 2019
“Big Dams do the opposite of what their Publicity People say they do…For all these reasons, the dam-building industry in the First World is in trouble and out of work. So it’s exported to the Third World in the name of Development Aid, along with their other waste like old weapons, superannuated aircraft carriers and banned pesticides."
This is about the highly controversial Sardar Sarovar dam, which concerns at least three states in north west India. I have to say that I had never heard of this vast project before. But nevertheless this is an age old story which would be recognised in pretty much any other country in the world, that ole familiar combination of lies, greed and deception by a small group of elite in the case The Iron Triangle (dam jargon between politicians, bureaucrats and dam construction companies).
“Most rivers in India are monsoon-fed. Between 80 and 85% of the flow takes place during the rainy months.” She also shows the many ways in which dams can alter the delicate balance of the rivers. We see how that the construction of the dam has a disproportionate effect on the poorest and neediest in society, in this case the Adivasi (The Indigenous people of India) and the Dalits (The lowest in the archaic caste system often referred to as The Untouchables).
This is the first time I have read Roy. This was written exactly 20 years ago, yet her direct no nonsense approach has not aged a jot, proving that quality writing really can be timeless. She attacks from all angles, remaining measured, direct and devastating throughout. The clarity of her argument is so clear that it really drives home her point. This reminds us what great journalists can do when they are at their best. Giving a voice to the lost, mute and forgotten who never get a platform to be heard or understood.
“Between 1947 and 1994 the World Bank’s management submitted 6,000 projects to the Executive Board. The board hasn’t turned down a single one…India is in a situation today where it pays back more money to The Bank in interest and repayment instalments than it receives from it…Over the last five years (1993 to 1998) India paid The Bank $1.475 billion more than it received.”
The second, smaller essay is on India’s bizarre and terrifying nuclear weapons project. Again Roy makes so many great points and shows how reckless, hypocritical and dangerous the logic (or lack of) behind it all.
“India’s nuclear bomb is the final act of betrayal by a ruling class that has failed its people…the truth is that it’s far easier to make a bomb than to educate four hundred million people.”
February 10, 2017
This is classic. Arundhati brought all irony in one single table called India. About dams, the nuclear weapons, the deficit of democracy, adivasi (indigenous peoples in India), lack of access to justice and our ignorant to one another.
"To slow a beast, you break its limbs. To slow a nation, you break its people. You rob them volition. You demonstrate your absolute command over their destiny. You make it clear that ultimately it falls to you to decide who lives, who dies, who prospers, who doesn't."
I couldn't be more than agree with her.
"To slow a beast, you break its limbs. To slow a nation, you break its people. You rob them volition. You demonstrate your absolute command over their destiny. You make it clear that ultimately it falls to you to decide who lives, who dies, who prospers, who doesn't."
I couldn't be more than agree with her.
August 18, 2017
Roy has an incredibly irritating writing style. Her first essay, regarding the costs of large dams, is frequently interrupted by near-stream-of-consciousness pop psychology babbles on global culture that waste space and are uninformative. She also wastes time and pages on moral exhortations ---
I understand that 50 million is a large number without her needing to spend 3 pages bludgeoning me over the head of the ethical import of displacing that many people. Additionally, the essay needed to be more technical; she wasted a golden opportunity to present information on the (technical) environmental impacts of damns to a reading public. Importantly, without the technical information it is impossible to present a cogent argument. Is it just the multi-use dams that are bad? What about only hydroelectric dams? Given that you basically have three choices for power generation --- burning coal, nuclear power, hydroelectric --- what do you pick? What is the better irrigation technology? I am sure these large dams are not the answer, but reading her essay I have no answers to these questions. Finally, her repeated comparisons between living in a slum and living in a Nazi death camp are tiresome and offensive. There are numerous slum dwellers in India who have experienced cataclysmic social violence (e.g., pogroms, riots, state-sanctioned murder, etc.). I am fairly certain if you ask them whether they prefer living in a pogrom vs. daily life in a slum they will choose the latter. A good writer would be able to convey the misery of the rehabilitation camps without resorting to tired comparisons.
Her second essay is less about nuclear bombs and more a critique of fascist undercurrents in Indian nationalism. It is better than the first and prescient given the rise to power of the Hindu lynch mob. Here, too, though she falls into tired cliches of the Indian intellectual class. She is terrified of what Indian society will do with the nuclear bomb given the large masses of "illiterate" people who know nothing of the consequences of the bomb. Her fear is misplaced; she has far more to fear from her bourgeois fascist neighbor who cheers the army of rapists in Kashmir and articulates support for lynch mobs. Most illiterate people in India live in rural areas and are sophisticated voters who focus on redistributive schemes and empowering governments who will bring tangible benefits to their communities. Rarely are they voting on 'the Pakistan threat', whatever that may be. It is the urban lynch mobs, who contain many literate people, who are more worrisome. This tired narrative of the brutality/ignorance of the poor/uneducated is old: similar narratives exist about Partition violence. Then too it was the educated urban middle class who formed and armed militias and partook in the bloodshed.
I understand that 50 million is a large number without her needing to spend 3 pages bludgeoning me over the head of the ethical import of displacing that many people. Additionally, the essay needed to be more technical; she wasted a golden opportunity to present information on the (technical) environmental impacts of damns to a reading public. Importantly, without the technical information it is impossible to present a cogent argument. Is it just the multi-use dams that are bad? What about only hydroelectric dams? Given that you basically have three choices for power generation --- burning coal, nuclear power, hydroelectric --- what do you pick? What is the better irrigation technology? I am sure these large dams are not the answer, but reading her essay I have no answers to these questions. Finally, her repeated comparisons between living in a slum and living in a Nazi death camp are tiresome and offensive. There are numerous slum dwellers in India who have experienced cataclysmic social violence (e.g., pogroms, riots, state-sanctioned murder, etc.). I am fairly certain if you ask them whether they prefer living in a pogrom vs. daily life in a slum they will choose the latter. A good writer would be able to convey the misery of the rehabilitation camps without resorting to tired comparisons.
Her second essay is less about nuclear bombs and more a critique of fascist undercurrents in Indian nationalism. It is better than the first and prescient given the rise to power of the Hindu lynch mob. Here, too, though she falls into tired cliches of the Indian intellectual class. She is terrified of what Indian society will do with the nuclear bomb given the large masses of "illiterate" people who know nothing of the consequences of the bomb. Her fear is misplaced; she has far more to fear from her bourgeois fascist neighbor who cheers the army of rapists in Kashmir and articulates support for lynch mobs. Most illiterate people in India live in rural areas and are sophisticated voters who focus on redistributive schemes and empowering governments who will bring tangible benefits to their communities. Rarely are they voting on 'the Pakistan threat', whatever that may be. It is the urban lynch mobs, who contain many literate people, who are more worrisome. This tired narrative of the brutality/ignorance of the poor/uneducated is old: similar narratives exist about Partition violence. Then too it was the educated urban middle class who formed and armed militias and partook in the bloodshed.
June 28, 2017
As said in the description, this book has Arundhati Roy taking on two issues which she sees as deluding us into a false sense of national pride: Dams and the nuclear bomb.
For someone like me who belongs to the upper middle class, dams and the protests surrounding them just remain as headlines I glance through and end up not giving a second thought about. The fact that the idea that the advantages of a dam far outweigh its disadvantages is a tenet that holds true for comparatively privileged people like me struck me emphatically by going through the first essay of the book. The gross injustice being done to those affected by the construction of a dam in the name of the greater good and the scale of the injustice was something I had to encounter on account of this book.
Her second essay was more of a mixed experience for me. Her paranoia with regards to the nuclear tests and its success was, at least for me, slightly far-fetched though not entirely unlikely. I do agree with her sentiment that those who do not go about thumping their chests with the success of the bomb being labelled anti-national is a mockery of democracy. The observation of the intolerance of the government to it being criticized eerily rings true even today, even though this book was written in 1999.
Overall a lucid, crisp polemic by an author who didn't rest on her laurels despite the adulation that she gained almost overnight; an aspect I find worth appreciating.
For someone like me who belongs to the upper middle class, dams and the protests surrounding them just remain as headlines I glance through and end up not giving a second thought about. The fact that the idea that the advantages of a dam far outweigh its disadvantages is a tenet that holds true for comparatively privileged people like me struck me emphatically by going through the first essay of the book. The gross injustice being done to those affected by the construction of a dam in the name of the greater good and the scale of the injustice was something I had to encounter on account of this book.
Her second essay was more of a mixed experience for me. Her paranoia with regards to the nuclear tests and its success was, at least for me, slightly far-fetched though not entirely unlikely. I do agree with her sentiment that those who do not go about thumping their chests with the success of the bomb being labelled anti-national is a mockery of democracy. The observation of the intolerance of the government to it being criticized eerily rings true even today, even though this book was written in 1999.
Overall a lucid, crisp polemic by an author who didn't rest on her laurels despite the adulation that she gained almost overnight; an aspect I find worth appreciating.
June 7, 2025
I really thought this was short fiction, oops. Regardless, Arundhati Roy is a great writer, and so her essays were easy and elegant reads. I wasn’t so much captured by her critique of the Indian government, the world bank, and their dam projects in India, or her thoughts on why nuclear bombs are bad, I agree. I think raising the issue and reminding those who have already been told is valid but the length, especially the first essays’s, was long for me, more appropriate for the job of convincing I guess.
June 28, 2017
Though nearly 20 years old the point of these polemics still stands - and it's great to read Roy in this context, passionate, having some fun with language too, but ultimately expressing a greatly articulated rage.
January 14, 2024
This is a scathing polemic by Arundhati Roy on the Indian government initiatives to build expensive dam projects and nuclear bombs. Using bullets disguised as facts, this book places a heavy question mark on the empty promises that the government makes to poor farmers and tribes before eradicating their homes -- all in the name of the greater common good.
Roy's Leftism percolates all of her works, and this being a non-fiction piece is even more directly so.
Roy's Leftism percolates all of her works, and this being a non-fiction piece is even more directly so.
April 3, 2016
Wow, wow, wow. I haven't read Roy's fiction, but she is an absolutely amazing polemicist. Her ethically engaged, brutally irony, coldly confrontational, and deeply moving prose shows a an elegant rage equal to the best every produced by someone like Marx (A specter hangs over India?). The two essays in this collection pull no punches in holding the Indian government accountable for the horrendous mistakes of the mega-dams and India's nuclear armament. The mega-dams displace tens (maybe even hundreds) of millions of people, who get no compensation, no land, no jobs, no opportunities, and no hope in return; they destroy environments, cultures, agricultural lands, ecosystems, biodiversity; they produce tiny fractions of the benefits promised to the public, often costing 3-4 times the estimated price and bringing only small benefits when they bring benefits at all. This is a critique of India's immersion in the neoliberal world order--the order of international capitalism that sees the role of governments and international financial institutions as essentially ATMs there to disburse money for projects with no real objective/detached/independent analysis of whether the money should be spent.
In the second essay of this collection Roy argues that the Indian government built the bomb precisely because it is easier to brandish a stick capable of destroying the planet than it is to actually help those citizens most in need. The government chose the singular vision of India it wanted, and tricked the public (who remain criminally under-educated, under-fed, and unable to access necessary resources like safe drinking water) into endorsing the bomb as an expression of Hindu nationalism and the violent disregard for consequences.
In the second essay of this collection Roy argues that the Indian government built the bomb precisely because it is easier to brandish a stick capable of destroying the planet than it is to actually help those citizens most in need. The government chose the singular vision of India it wanted, and tricked the public (who remain criminally under-educated, under-fed, and unable to access necessary resources like safe drinking water) into endorsing the bomb as an expression of Hindu nationalism and the violent disregard for consequences.
April 16, 2011
I really just read the second essay in the book called "The End of Imagination." It was really something that reminded me about how violent and terrifying nuclear bombs are. I feel like I've just grown complacent and accepting that the nuclear bombs exist and that we, as Americans, of course are allowed to have them more than anyone else. Because clearly we've proven that we are not a country of lunatics, we don't have genocide (anymore), or religious hatred (yeah, right).
How horrifying that more and more countries, including my own, are working on ways to absolutely obliterate other people. How I love how she states in the essay that the only way this system really works is if our enemies truly have the same fears as us (non-extinction) yet, how many uncontrollable and unimaginable tragedies have occurred due to our enemies not thinking like us at all? Not thinking that annihilation is the worst possible outcome?
It was fascinating, and even though it was mainly about India's nuclear program it was truly insightful and applicable to us all.
How horrifying that more and more countries, including my own, are working on ways to absolutely obliterate other people. How I love how she states in the essay that the only way this system really works is if our enemies truly have the same fears as us (non-extinction) yet, how many uncontrollable and unimaginable tragedies have occurred due to our enemies not thinking like us at all? Not thinking that annihilation is the worst possible outcome?
It was fascinating, and even though it was mainly about India's nuclear program it was truly insightful and applicable to us all.
January 24, 2022
Roy calls for specificity, something I often lack in my own writing. I often get carried away in prose, in sentiment, failing to include the details that will actually make a difference. "Can we unscramble it?" she asks, referring to the mess we have made of our connections to and understanding of the planet, to democracies that are anything but free, to "development" that takes more than it gives. "Maybe," she response. Maybe we can unscramble this mess. "Inch by inch. Bomb by bomb. Dam by dam. Maybe by fighting specific wars in specific ways. We could been in the Narmada Valley." (81).
And this she does throughout the entire book. In a mere 80 pages, she works through the consequences of these dams (water logging, displacement, destruction of farmlands and forests, more water devoted market crops, more people living in slums), costs not taken into account, corruption in the system at every level, disregard for World Bank evaluations of human and planetary impacts of the dam (which disregard is often that of the WB itself), specific speeches made, specific promises promised and broken, specifics of dam technology, specific places affected, specific people, specific numbers, specific stories.
A few quotes:
"The millions of displaced people in India are nothing but refugees of an unacknowledged war. And we, like the citizens of White Ameirca and French Canada and Hitler's Germany, are condoning it by looking away. Why? Because we're told that it's being done for the sake of the Greater Common Good. that it's being done in the name of Progress, in the name of the National Interest (which, of course, is paramount). Therefore gladly, unquestioningly, almost gratefully, we believe what we're told. We believe what it benefits us to believe. Allow me to shake your faith." (21)
"The Bargi dam near Jabalpur...cost ten times more than was budgeted and submerged three times more land than the engineers said it would. About 70,000 people from 101 villages were supposed to be displaced, but then they filled the reservoir (without warning anybody), 162 villages were submerged. Some of the resettlement sites built by the government were submerged as well. People were flushed out like rats from the land they had lived on for centuries. They salvaged what they could, and watched their houses being washed away. One hundred and fourteen thousand people were displaced. There was no rehabilitation policy. Some were gviven meager cash compensation. Many got absolutely noting. A few were moved to government rehabilitation sites. The site at Gorakhpur is, according to government publicity, an 'ideal village.' Between 1990 and 1992, five people died of starvation there. The rest either returned to live illegally in the forests near the reservoir, or moved to slums in Jabalpur." (35)
"'India will go on,' they'll tell you, the sage philosophers who don't want to be troubled by piddling current affairs. As though 'India' is somehow more valuable than her people." (42)
"So far, the Sardar Saraovar reservoir has submerged only a fourth of the area that it will when (if) the dam reaches its full height. If we stop it now, we would save 325,000 people from certain destitution. As for the economics of it -- it's true that the government has already spend Rs. 7,500 crores, but continuing with the project would mean throwing good money after bad. We would save something like Rs. 35,000 crores of public money, probably enough to fund local water-harvesting projects in every village in all of Gujarat. What could possibly be a more worthwhile war?" (42)
"The war for the Narmada valley is not just some exotic tribal war, or a remote rural war or even an exclusively Indian war. It's a war for the rivers and the mountains and the forests of the world. All sorts of warriors from all over the world, anyone who wishes to enlistt, will be honored and welcomed. Every kind of warrior will be needed. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, judges, journalists, students, sportsmen, painters, actors, singers, lovers...The borders are open, folks! Come on in." (43)
"Suddenly they can't trust their river anymore. It's like a loved one who has developed symptoms of psychosis. Anyone who has loved a river can tell you that the loss of a river is a terrible, aching thing. But I'll be rapped on the knuckles if I continue in this vein. When we're discussing the Greater Common Good, there's no room for sentiment. One must stick to the facts. Forgive me for letting my heart wander." (50).
Will finish later. Notes on settlements on page 53, the political fanfare of big development projects on page 60, religion/politics 63, publicity/greenwashing/whatever the equivalent of greenwashing is for affected tribal communities on pg 63-65, salinization/fish/waterlogging/lack of pilot projects for new computer projects 65-75.
To finish, rather ironically, another (not-too-specific) quote on the importance of specificity, which follows a discussion of Ghandi's and Nehru's respective approaches to nationalism and progress, both of which have their failings:
"It's possible that as a nation we've exhausted our quota of heroes for this century, but while we wait for shiny new ones to come along, we have to limit the damage. We have to support our small heroes. (Of these we have many. Many.) We have to fight specific wars in specific ways. Who knows, perhaps that's what the twenty-first century has in store for us. The dismantling of the Big. Big bombs. big dams, big ideologies, big contradictions, big countries, big wars, big heroes, big mistakes. Perhaps right now, this very minute, there's a small god up in heaven reading herself for us. Could it be? Could it possibly be? It sounds finger-licking good to me."
And this she does throughout the entire book. In a mere 80 pages, she works through the consequences of these dams (water logging, displacement, destruction of farmlands and forests, more water devoted market crops, more people living in slums), costs not taken into account, corruption in the system at every level, disregard for World Bank evaluations of human and planetary impacts of the dam (which disregard is often that of the WB itself), specific speeches made, specific promises promised and broken, specifics of dam technology, specific places affected, specific people, specific numbers, specific stories.
A few quotes:
"The millions of displaced people in India are nothing but refugees of an unacknowledged war. And we, like the citizens of White Ameirca and French Canada and Hitler's Germany, are condoning it by looking away. Why? Because we're told that it's being done for the sake of the Greater Common Good. that it's being done in the name of Progress, in the name of the National Interest (which, of course, is paramount). Therefore gladly, unquestioningly, almost gratefully, we believe what we're told. We believe what it benefits us to believe. Allow me to shake your faith." (21)
"The Bargi dam near Jabalpur...cost ten times more than was budgeted and submerged three times more land than the engineers said it would. About 70,000 people from 101 villages were supposed to be displaced, but then they filled the reservoir (without warning anybody), 162 villages were submerged. Some of the resettlement sites built by the government were submerged as well. People were flushed out like rats from the land they had lived on for centuries. They salvaged what they could, and watched their houses being washed away. One hundred and fourteen thousand people were displaced. There was no rehabilitation policy. Some were gviven meager cash compensation. Many got absolutely noting. A few were moved to government rehabilitation sites. The site at Gorakhpur is, according to government publicity, an 'ideal village.' Between 1990 and 1992, five people died of starvation there. The rest either returned to live illegally in the forests near the reservoir, or moved to slums in Jabalpur." (35)
"'India will go on,' they'll tell you, the sage philosophers who don't want to be troubled by piddling current affairs. As though 'India' is somehow more valuable than her people." (42)
"So far, the Sardar Saraovar reservoir has submerged only a fourth of the area that it will when (if) the dam reaches its full height. If we stop it now, we would save 325,000 people from certain destitution. As for the economics of it -- it's true that the government has already spend Rs. 7,500 crores, but continuing with the project would mean throwing good money after bad. We would save something like Rs. 35,000 crores of public money, probably enough to fund local water-harvesting projects in every village in all of Gujarat. What could possibly be a more worthwhile war?" (42)
"The war for the Narmada valley is not just some exotic tribal war, or a remote rural war or even an exclusively Indian war. It's a war for the rivers and the mountains and the forests of the world. All sorts of warriors from all over the world, anyone who wishes to enlistt, will be honored and welcomed. Every kind of warrior will be needed. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, judges, journalists, students, sportsmen, painters, actors, singers, lovers...The borders are open, folks! Come on in." (43)
"Suddenly they can't trust their river anymore. It's like a loved one who has developed symptoms of psychosis. Anyone who has loved a river can tell you that the loss of a river is a terrible, aching thing. But I'll be rapped on the knuckles if I continue in this vein. When we're discussing the Greater Common Good, there's no room for sentiment. One must stick to the facts. Forgive me for letting my heart wander." (50).
Will finish later. Notes on settlements on page 53, the political fanfare of big development projects on page 60, religion/politics 63, publicity/greenwashing/whatever the equivalent of greenwashing is for affected tribal communities on pg 63-65, salinization/fish/waterlogging/lack of pilot projects for new computer projects 65-75.
To finish, rather ironically, another (not-too-specific) quote on the importance of specificity, which follows a discussion of Ghandi's and Nehru's respective approaches to nationalism and progress, both of which have their failings:
"It's possible that as a nation we've exhausted our quota of heroes for this century, but while we wait for shiny new ones to come along, we have to limit the damage. We have to support our small heroes. (Of these we have many. Many.) We have to fight specific wars in specific ways. Who knows, perhaps that's what the twenty-first century has in store for us. The dismantling of the Big. Big bombs. big dams, big ideologies, big contradictions, big countries, big wars, big heroes, big mistakes. Perhaps right now, this very minute, there's a small god up in heaven reading herself for us. Could it be? Could it possibly be? It sounds finger-licking good to me."
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 2, 2008
Two great essays. One concerning the building of a damn in India and the other their first nuclear testing. Contains her famous quote:
To love. To be loved. To never forget you own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.
Amazing.
To love. To be loved. To never forget you own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.
Amazing.
July 3, 2009
Features two essays ("The Greater Common Good" and "The End of Imagination") previously published in the magazines Frontline and Outlook. "The Greater Common Good" details the horrors caused by dam-building in India. "The End of Imagination" focuses on the detonation of India's first nuclear bomb. Both essays were extremely haunting and thought-provoking. However, I read both essays roughly 10 years after their original publications and I don't know much about what has happened since...improved? worsened? stayed the same? More research required on my part.
May 20, 2016
This is the third book I have read by Arundhati Roy. As always, she is an amazing writer. Clear, concise, quick to the point, sharp, and witty. Her writing imparts a sense of urgency - a rallying call to arms and action. Too often, the content of what she writes leaves one with their blood boiling and in a wave of utter disillusionment and despair. That is intended, I believe, but it should not allow the overshadow the message of action for she sheds ample light on those fighting for their rights and brings their cause - which should be our cause - from the shadows of obscurity.
July 7, 2008
damn dams
February 11, 2023
I decided to re-read Arundhati Roy's novel “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness” after reading Arundhati Roy's collection of essays "The Cost of Living". I used to read that novel in 2019. But at that time, I had a hard time following the plot. Feeling indirectly connected to various political, social, religious, caste, and other conundrums that seem to be simply thrust into a large basin without feeling that they are bound to one another. However, after reading two long essays in "The Cost of Living", I have more or less understood Arundhati Roy's political views. How his anxiety witnessed the various bloody events in his country, how he photographed India through glasses that were furious, sad, hopeless, cynical, anger that was fired at one point accompanied by a good argument.
Long before I learned that the dam project was a crucial issue in India through Arundhati Roy's book of essays, I remember reading a short story entitled "Guardians of the Dams" by an Indian writer; R.K. Narayan. Simple short stories. It tells the story of a dam guard who has a deep dialogue with a young woman in the middle of the night. Desperate because her life was overwritten by many misfortunes, the woman wanted to end her life at the dam. In the story, it is not explained whether the woman did not commit suicide or vice versa. Years later, the dam keeper meets a female figure who reminds him of the woman from that past night. The end of the story is also vague. It is unclear whether they are actually the same girl or not.
Aside from the good story, the fact that the short story "Guardians of the Dam" is the "first translated work" that I read, has left a deep impression to this day. At that time I did not know that R.K Narayan was an Indian writer. It's the short story; the first translation that accompanied my early acquaintance with the world of literature.
However, the meaning of "dam" in R.K. Narayan, who previously only reached me as a background story, now comes with a very different meaning. It's dangerous, it's dramatic, India's ravaged face. This new understanding was conveyed by Arundhati Roy from her book "The Cost of Living" which arrived from a long time ago, arrived too late because I just read it now. But strong enough to be a trigger for re-reading his novel "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness" which in most reviews is said to be Roy's novel which is difficult to understand compared to his previous novel, "The God of Small Things."
I think it is really necessary to get closer to the author's autobiography in order to better understand his works. One of them also reads his non-fiction works as I applied in this reading, connecting "The Cost of Living" with "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.”
Long before I learned that the dam project was a crucial issue in India through Arundhati Roy's book of essays, I remember reading a short story entitled "Guardians of the Dams" by an Indian writer; R.K. Narayan. Simple short stories. It tells the story of a dam guard who has a deep dialogue with a young woman in the middle of the night. Desperate because her life was overwritten by many misfortunes, the woman wanted to end her life at the dam. In the story, it is not explained whether the woman did not commit suicide or vice versa. Years later, the dam keeper meets a female figure who reminds him of the woman from that past night. The end of the story is also vague. It is unclear whether they are actually the same girl or not.
Aside from the good story, the fact that the short story "Guardians of the Dam" is the "first translated work" that I read, has left a deep impression to this day. At that time I did not know that R.K Narayan was an Indian writer. It's the short story; the first translation that accompanied my early acquaintance with the world of literature.
However, the meaning of "dam" in R.K. Narayan, who previously only reached me as a background story, now comes with a very different meaning. It's dangerous, it's dramatic, India's ravaged face. This new understanding was conveyed by Arundhati Roy from her book "The Cost of Living" which arrived from a long time ago, arrived too late because I just read it now. But strong enough to be a trigger for re-reading his novel "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness" which in most reviews is said to be Roy's novel which is difficult to understand compared to his previous novel, "The God of Small Things."
I think it is really necessary to get closer to the author's autobiography in order to better understand his works. One of them also reads his non-fiction works as I applied in this reading, connecting "The Cost of Living" with "The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.”
August 4, 2017
"To slow a beast, you break its limbs. To slow a nation, you break its people. You rob them of volition. You demonstrate your absolute command over their destiny. You make it clear that ultimately it falls to you to decide who lives, who dies, who prospers, who doesn’t. To exhibit your capability you show off all that you can do, and how easily you can do it. How easily you could press a button and annihilate the earth. How you can start a war, or sue for peace. How you can snatch a river away from one and gift it to another. How you can green a desert, or fell a forest and plant one somewhere else. You use caprice to fracture a people’s faith in ancient things- earth, forest, water, air."
"Once that’s done, what do they have left? Only you. They will turn to you, because you’re all they have. They will love you even while they despise you. They will trust you even though they know you well. They will vote for you even as you squeeze the very breath from their bodies. They will drink what you give them to drink. They will breathe what you give them to breathe.
They will live where you dump their belongings. They have to. What else can they do? There’s no higher court of redress. You are their mother and their father. You are the judge and the jury. You are the World. You are God."
"Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or think they have) gained."
I use this quote frequently in my work. I can think of no better expression of the difference between a 'charity' and a 'social justice' mindset, and why it matters.
"Once that’s done, what do they have left? Only you. They will turn to you, because you’re all they have. They will love you even while they despise you. They will trust you even though they know you well. They will vote for you even as you squeeze the very breath from their bodies. They will drink what you give them to drink. They will breathe what you give them to breathe.
They will live where you dump their belongings. They have to. What else can they do? There’s no higher court of redress. You are their mother and their father. You are the judge and the jury. You are the World. You are God."
"Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or think they have) gained."
I use this quote frequently in my work. I can think of no better expression of the difference between a 'charity' and a 'social justice' mindset, and why it matters.
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