rich vs poor
Indian writer Arundhati Roy has produced just one novel - The God of Small Things in 1997, which won the Booker Prize, one of the world's most prestigious literary awards. In the twelve years since, Roy has allowed herself to be distracted by domestic politics and environmental activism, in a country riddled with social and political problems as a counterpoint to its dramatic economic growth rates. Her writing has been confined to political essays the latest of which, decrying a decline in Indian democracy, has just been published......
.....far from working as a system of checks and balances, the institutions of democracy, the judiciary, the police, the free press and the electoral system quite often do the opposite.
So is the democratic model in danger of hollowing itself out as the pressures of a growing middle class outstrip the desire to protect all the people?
KERRY OBRIEN: You say in the book that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximising profit. But where you see maximising profits, others would see a necessary creation of wealth from which the majority of Indians will ultimately benefit; With jobs, education, health and so on. Whats the alternative to this creation of wealth as the bedrock of Indias future?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Of course when I said that I didnt just mean about India, I meant democracy and the free market effused as an idea all over the world..... and I completely contest this idea of the creation of wealth, because you equally could look at it as an absolute destruction of wealth depending on how you define wealth because if youre going to create wealth out of destroying rivers, out of destroying forests and you know mountain systems, youre actually so short sighted and youre actually taking people away from their resources, and concentrating this wealth in the hands of a very few and pretending that at some later point youre going to redistribute it, that point never comes, it never happens .....so in fact not just India but all over the world we are seeing this huge divide between the rich and the poor and one whole sort of majority, the majority of the worlds poor are sliding into chaos and a chaos that is exacerbated by a kind of ecological collapse, in India not a single river runs any more to the sea.....
..... Australia does have a history of racism that all of us are aware of, but so does India. And once again, these are not things the Indian press will talk about so the racist attacks on Indian students were horrifying and as horrifying as middle, as you know upper caste and middle caste attacks, brutal attacks on dalits in India.....
Indian writer Arundhati Roy has produced just one novel - The God of Small Things in 1997, which won the Booker Prize, one of the world's most prestigious literary awards. In the twelve years since, Roy has allowed herself to be distracted by domestic politics and environmental activism, in a country riddled with social and political problems as a counterpoint to its dramatic economic growth rates. Her writing has been confined to political essays the latest of which, decrying a decline in Indian democracy, has just been published......
.....far from working as a system of checks and balances, the institutions of democracy, the judiciary, the police, the free press and the electoral system quite often do the opposite.
So is the democratic model in danger of hollowing itself out as the pressures of a growing middle class outstrip the desire to protect all the people?
KERRY OBRIEN: You say in the book that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximising profit. But where you see maximising profits, others would see a necessary creation of wealth from which the majority of Indians will ultimately benefit; With jobs, education, health and so on. Whats the alternative to this creation of wealth as the bedrock of Indias future?
ARUNDHATI ROY: Of course when I said that I didnt just mean about India, I meant democracy and the free market effused as an idea all over the world..... and I completely contest this idea of the creation of wealth, because you equally could look at it as an absolute destruction of wealth depending on how you define wealth because if youre going to create wealth out of destroying rivers, out of destroying forests and you know mountain systems, youre actually so short sighted and youre actually taking people away from their resources, and concentrating this wealth in the hands of a very few and pretending that at some later point youre going to redistribute it, that point never comes, it never happens .....so in fact not just India but all over the world we are seeing this huge divide between the rich and the poor and one whole sort of majority, the majority of the worlds poor are sliding into chaos and a chaos that is exacerbated by a kind of ecological collapse, in India not a single river runs any more to the sea.....
..... Australia does have a history of racism that all of us are aware of, but so does India. And once again, these are not things the Indian press will talk about so the racist attacks on Indian students were horrifying and as horrifying as middle, as you know upper caste and middle caste attacks, brutal attacks on dalits in India.....
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