Now that you 've called him Sir, we 'll bomb you!

If you proclaim that two people are your enemies and one of them honours the other, should you raise a storm over it? NO NO NO!! But apparently the Muslim extremists the world over do not get this. The knighthood of Mr. Rushdie is an insult to us and our religion, they say. Here we have a nation that has a colonial legacy and imperialist present (read support for the war on of terror :-) ) , conferring a title on a writer, who in the first place should not have accepted it, and instead of looking at the whole thing as an exercise in stupidity it is perceived as an insult and a hue and cry is raised over it. Someone has also called for a strike in Kashmir, he he he. I wait to hear the liberal voice, preferrably Muslim, denouncing this on national television.

Jesus Stop!!

This is what happens when god is publicised overzealously :-) They end up asking him to stop.. The Jesus sticker can nowadays be found on most of Bangalore's traffic signs.

What Arundhati Roy gets right and what she gets wrong.

I have read two of her socio/political books, The Algebra of Infinite Justice and The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire. Both are very well written as is expected from an author of her stature. Her tongue is sharp and the vivid picture she paints about the capability of our government for repression of its own people in the stories about the Narmada Bachao Andolan and the dirty world of big business behind it, the IMF, the World Bank and most depressing of all the Indian Supreme court's cavalier judgements in the matter leaves one with a lot of questions. Questions about our way of life and about the crazy comfort zone that we the privileged few live in. And most of all one is left with a sense of helplessness, of frustration and of anger. All this she gets right, spot on.
However, on reading both of the books one cannot but disagree with her views on globalization and private enterprise. It just feels that she does not get it at all. She is critical of the government in almost every paragraph of her writings. However in the same breathe she is also critical of globalization and privatization. I am not claiming that privatization is without its evils. However for me it is the lesser of the two evils where the second happens to be complete government control. I do not want to go into why private enterprise is better. It has been argued and documented by better people before. However just for quick examples look at the telecom industry in India, compare it with the times when about 7 years ago one used to wait for late night calls to ones home (and they still used to cost more than what a prime time call today costs) and you ll know. Her commentary assumes that private business and earning money is inherently vulgar and evil. It is hard for me to digest why she has such an irrational point of view. If one does not approve of private enterprise and also not approve of government enterprise, what is the alternative left, whom do you trust? Should we go back to being a hunter-gatherer society? I remember a certain IITB professor once saying that the industrial revolution has been the single biggest mistake in the history of mankind. Maybe Arundhati Roy will also support that view.