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In Marcia Con I Ribelli (2012)

by Arundhati Roy(Favorite Author)

3.99 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

8860886880 (ISBN13: 9788860886880)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Guanda

review 1: A sharp and very important account of the struggle in India between the ordinary people and the government that is supposed to protect their needs. A better phrasing might be-The struggle of the Indian democracy against it's poor people.The first half of the book narrates the account of her journey into the forest with the 'rebels' called Naxals, and the life and their realities that she encounters there. The second half is an essay on the consequences and possible outcomes of this struggle. The book talks of issues that are no more closer to resolution than when she wrote this four years back; on which not much true/direct reporting has happened. And, she doesn't shy away from taking names or being blunt in her accounts. This makes it a definitely worthy read. Also worth ... morementioning, that her prose is as beautiful as ever. Even delivering such a heavy message, there are places where we pause to admire the words.
review 2: ------------- "There’s nothing small about what’s going on. We are watching a democracy turning on itself, trying to eat its own limbs. We’re watching incredulously as those limbs refuse to be eaten."------------- "If there is any hope for the world at all, it does not live in climate change conference rooms or in cities with tall buildings. It lives low down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them.The first step towards re-imagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination—an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past, but who may really be the guides to our future.To do this, we have to ask our rulers: Can you leave the water in the rivers? The trees in the forest? Can you leave the bauxite in the mountain?"The above quotes conclude the third of Ms Arundahti Roy's powerful collection of essays which document narratives of tribal life in East India that had up to its publication been left unfairly untold. In a civil war of absurdly disproportionate proportions, of black and white media coverage, and of atrocity emanating from both sides, complete with typified self-defense justifications... nobody seems to be winning except the financiers. What else is new.Ms Roy is a joy to read, in spite of the tragedy of her subject matter, because of the humanity and emotion she infuses in her every word. One can't help but get lost in the trains of thought she conducts as they hop from one track to the next, thrust forward and thrown in reverse, idling only to comment on grey nuance that gets lost in all the absolutist rhetoric she hears. Her language is plain simple and clear, her observations distressing yet lightweight, baring for the reader both the heartbreaking suffering endured by her subjects as well as the immensity of the bravery that fuels their persistence.The parties involved are numerous and BIG. There are at least three Communist Parties. Many dozens of mining corporations. Government ministers and agencies and bureaucrats and judges. A tremendous variety of police and paramilitary forces that couldn't be controlled in the most temperate of climates. Not to mention the Prime Minister chicken littling with panicked cries of "internal security threats".But most significantly are not the shareholders but the stakeholders, bystanding innocents who's only crime is inheriting a lifestyle of living on the obscene potential of mineral deposits, and who are only incriminated by virtue of associating with the only dissidents who seem willing to help them... mostly narrow-minded ideologues with visions of grandiosity and brutal tactics that they don't seem to realize consistently undermine their own cause. But then, as Ms Roy so eloquently and frequently asks; what other choice do they have besides surrender?I've always enjoyed first hand accounts of investigative journalism. It flies squarely in the face of 'the objective ideal', a false flag operation if ever there was one. Ms Roy is never afraid to inject her own observations, intrinsically as biased as anybody else's, into her essays; though like a responsible intellectual, she always ensures that a qualifier enters into the reader's attention.To fully understand the connotations of the closing paragraphs I quoted above, one must be willing to scrutinize a few core assumptions of modernity, of trade and growth and progress, of whether we should let our natural environment, our habitat, recede inevitably and invariably into the background; or whether we MUST return it to the focus of our mind's eye, as absolutely essential to identity; who a human being is and what a human being does and why a human being does it.This is an amazing account of a microcosm in the economic-environmental paradigm of the day; certainly it generalizes around the world. A much needed perspective that would benefit anybody who took the time to become acquainted. Read this book. less

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