Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers

see the world as it is being used, not the PR we get from some news programs & government.

Arundhati Roy is one of the great thinkers of our time. This book exlains the world in ways most of us never thought. The knowledge learned in Fieldnotes on Democracy changed my views of democracy. PLEASE, everyone read it.

Arundhati Roy writes of the horrendous crimes against humanity in our times with such prose and elegance that one is capable of enduring the information. She deserves the highest honors for Her work.

Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers is an anthology of essays in which author Arundhati Roy (winner of the 2002 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize) seeks to answer the question "Is there life after democracy?" More specifically, she examines how Hindu nationalism and neo-liberal economic reforms in India, which arose during the early 1990s, are currently transforming India into a police state. From the deliberate and systematic marginalization of religious and ethnic minorities, to the increased power of predatory corporations that engineer the displacement of the poor on a gigantic scale, to the August 2008 uprising of the people of Kashmir against India's military occupation, to a scrutiny of the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, Field Notes on Democracy is sharply critical in its exposure of the weaknesses and corruption in India's current model of government. A thought-provoking read, Field Notes on Democracy warns against the abuses of wealth and power in India's current governmental system, and the threat of impending disaster. Highly recommended.

This is the second book that I have read this month which was recommended by Noam Chomsky. Field Notes on Democracy by Arundhati Roy is a shocking report of the hollowing-out of democratic values in India. It is brilliantly written, as was her novel, The God of Small Things. However, this book, unlike the novel, is as unlovely as torture, greed, pillage, waste and wholesale murder can be. It is a non-fiction account of how the world's largest democracy has had its concepts of social justice eroded by unbridled growth, corporate greed, destruction of the environment, and a government run by vested interests and touts. "Most chilling of all, writes Chomsky in his review, "is that much of this grim portrait is all too familiar to the West."Which, of course, brings me to the other book which I read following Chomsky's recommendation: Michael Hogan's Savage Capitalism and the Myth of Democracy. Here we see the same processes at work, not only in Latin America where Hogan lives and works, but also in the monolith to the north. These two books are companion pieces of East and West, especially attractive to readers like me who appreciate reality being cogently and elegantly expressed by social activists and are not ideologues but thoughtful and compassionate human beings who sincerely work to make a difference in the area where they live: for Roy, India; for Hogan, Latin America. They both bring us news of a real world and the demise of democracy on the altar of progress. As Ed Abbey once wrote, "Unlimited growth has the etiology of the cancer cell. Its ultimate goal is the destruction of its host."