Dear Ven'u, Thank you for sending in that link. It made for interesting reading. When God of Small things came out several years ago, I celebrated Roy. I think I was at the tail-end of my twenties then and we Indians needed a literary hero like Roy to fall in love with and to claim as our own. This was the New India, we were all going to become. Since then I have grown to despise Roy. She effectively wants to take India back into the dismal 60s and 70s where it lay in feotal position, fearful to look the world in the eye.
Unfortunately for Ms Roy, the middle-class that came of age in the 80s, will have none of it and so she becomes more shrill with each passing day. She rants against capitalism blaming it for everything from Pakistan being a failed state, to Islamic terrorism and military action in India. The truth is, the spread of Islamic terrorism has a much wider reach than she concedes. Many of the places where it has taken root, like pockets of Egypt and Jordan, have a history of socialism. Pakistan may have wanted to be "Capitalist" but it is hardly the same sort of democracy that is espoused by the US. She makes little allowances for difference. But I digress, getting back to India. I think, she alongwith a few left-wing intellectuals fail to understand the gravity of India's situation. It is a democracy with a population of over 1.2 billion people. This population has to be lifted out of the dire poverty that it finds itself in, which is spiralling out of control. People of Roy's ilk will oppose anything for dams, to nuclear plants, to roads, to mining. Afterall, it falls under the broad umbrella of capitalism. But there is no alternative vision on how to elevate people from the depths of poverty. Ms Roy writes about the romance of the poor. I wish she would walk with the poor as she is so fond of walking with the comrades. I wish she'd write about the malnutrition, the infant mortality, the mothers lost in child-birth, the prostitution, the wife battery, the alcoholism, the drug abuse, the lack of education, sanitation and cycle of poverty these people are trapped in. What vision and what alternative does she offer these people? None. Best, selma
