The Dholera SIR is only one of the smaller Matryoshka dolls, one of the inner ones in the dystopia that is being planned. It will be connected to the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC), a 1500 km long and 300 km wide industrial corridor, with nine Mega-industrial zones, a high speed freight line, three sea-ports, and six air ports; a six-lane intersection-free expressway and a 4000 MW power plant. The DMIC is a collaborative venture between the Governments of India and Japan, and their respective corporate partners, and has been proposed by the McKinsey Global Institute.

The DMIC web site says that approximately 180 million people will be “affected” by the project. Exactly how, it doesn’t say. It envisages the building of several new cities and estimates that the population in the region will grow from the current 231 million to 314 million by 2019. That’s in seven years’ time. When was the last time a State, despot or dictator carried out a population transfer of millions of people? Can it possibly be a peaceful process?

The Indian Army might need to go on a recruitment drive so that it’s not taken unawares when it is ordered to deploy all over India. In preparation for its role in Central India it publicly released its updated doctrine on Military Psychological Operations, which outlines “a planned process of conveying a message to a select target audience, to promote particular themes that result in desired attitudes and behaviour, which affect the achievement of political and military objectives of the country”. This process of ‘perception management’ it said, would be conducted by “using media available to the Services.”

The Army is experienced enough to know that coercive force alone cannot carry out or manage social engineering on the scale that is envisaged by India’s planners. War against the poor is one thing. But for the rest of us—the middle-class, white collar workers, intellectuals, ‘opinion makers’—it has to be ‘perception management’. And for this we must turn our attention to the exquisite art of Corporate Philanthropy.

Of late, the main mining conglomerates have embraced the Arts—film, art installations and the rush of literary festivals that have replaced the 1990s obsession with beauty contests. Vedanta, currently mining the heart out of the homelands of the ancient Dongria Kond tribe for bauxite, is sponsoring a ‘Creating Happiness’ film competition for young film students who they have commissioned to make films on sustainable development. Vedanta’s tagline is ‘Mining Happiness.’ The Jindal Group brings out a contemporary art magazine and supports some of India’s major artists (who naturally work with stainless steel). Essar was the principal sponsor of the Tehelka Newsweek Think Fest that promised ‘high octane debates’ by the foremost thinkers from around the world, which included major writers, activists and even the architect Frank Gehry. (All this in Goa while activists and journalists were uncovering massive illegal mining scandals that involved Essar.) Tata Steel and Rio Tinto (which has a sordid track record of its own) were among the chief sponsors of the Jaipur Literary Festival (Latin name: Darshan Singh Construction Jaipur Literary Festival) that is advertised by the cognoscenti as ‘The Greatest Literary Show on Earth’. Counselage, the Tatas ‘strategic brand manager’ sponsored the Festival’s press tent. Many of the world’s best and brightest writers gathered in Jaipur to discuss love, literature, politics and Sufi poetry. Some tried to defend Salman Rushdie’s right to free speech by reading from his proscribed book, The Satanic Verses. In every TV frame and newspaper photograph the logo of Tata Steel (and its tagline; Values Stronger than Steel) loomed behind them, a benign, benevolent host. The enemies of Free Speech were the supposedly murderous Muslim mobs, who, the festival organizers told us, could have even harmed the school children gathered there. (We are witness to how helpless the Indian government and the police can be when it comes to Muslims.) Yes, the hardline Darul-uloom Deobandi Islamic seminary did protest Rushdie being invited to the festival. Yes, some Islamists did gather at the festival venue to protest and yes, outrageously, the State Government did nothing to protect the venue. That’s because the whole episode had as much to do with democracy, vote-banks and the UP elections as it did with Islamist fundamentalism. But the battle for Free Speech against Islamist Fundamentalism made it to the world’s newspapers. It is important that it did. But there were hardly any reports about the Festival sponsors’ role in the war in the forests, the bodies piling up, the prisons filling up. Or about the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, which make even thinking an anti-government thought a cognizable offense. Or about the mandatory public hearing for the Tata Steel plant in Lohandiguda which local people complained actually took place hundreds of miles away in Jagdalpur, in the collector’s office compound, with a hired audience of fifty people, under armed guard. Where was Free Speech then? No one mentioned Kalinganagar. No one mentioned that journalists, academics and filmmakers working on subjects unpopular with the Indian Government—like the surreptitious part it played in the genocide of Tamils in the war in Sri Lanka, or the recently discovered unmarked graves in Kashmir—were being denied visas or deported straight from the airport.

But which of us sinners was going to cast the first stone? Not me, who lives off royalties from corporate publishing houses. We all watch Tata Sky, we surf the net with Tata Photon, we ride in Tata taxis, we stay in Tata Hotels, sip our Tata tea in Tata bone china and stir it with teaspoons made of Tata Steel. We buy Tata books in Tata bookshops. Hum Tata ka namak khatey hain. We’re under siege.

If the sledge-hammer of moral purity is to be the criteria for stone-throwing, then the only people who qualify are those who have been silenced already. Those who live outside the system; the outlaws in the forests or those whose protests are never covered by the press, or the well-behaved Dispossessed, who go from tribunal to tribunal, bearing witness, giving testimony.

When corporate-endowed Foundations first made their appearance in the US, there was a fierce debate about their provenance, legality and lack of accountability. People suggested that if companies had so much surplus money, they should raise the wages of their workers. (People made these outrageous suggestions in those days, even in America.) The idea of these Foundations, so ordinary now, was in fact a leap of the business imagination. Non-tax paying legal entities with massive resources and an almost unlimited brief—wholly unaccountable, wholly non-transparent— what better way to parlay economic wealth into political, social and cultural capital, to turn money into power? What better way for usurers to use a miniscule percentage of their profits to run the world? How else would Bill Gates who admittedly knows a thing or two about computers, find himself designing education, health and agriculture policies, not just for the US government, but for governments all over the world?

Over the years, as people witnessed some of the genuinely good work the Foundations did (running public libraries, eradicating diseases)—the direct connection between corporations and the Foundations they endowed began to blur. Eventually, it faded altogether. Now even those who consider themselves left wing are not shy to accept their largesse.

Corporate-endowed Foundations administer, trade and channelize their power and place their chessmen on the chessboard, through a system of elite clubs and think tanks, whose members overlap and move in and out through the revolving doors. Contrary to the various conspiracy theories in circulation, particularly among left-wing groups, there is nothing secret, satanic, or Free Mason-like about this arrangement. It is not very different from the way Corporations use shell companies and off-shore accounts to transfer and administer their money—except that the currency is power, not money.

The transnational equivalent of the CFR is the Trilateral Commission, set up in 1973 by David Rockefeller, the former US National Security Adviser Zibignew Brzezinski (Founder-member of the Afghan Mujahidin, forefathers of the Taliban), the Chase Manhattan Bank and some other private eminences. Its purpose was to create an enduring bond of friendship and co-operation between the elites of North America, Europe and Japan. It has now become a penta-lateral commission, because it includes members from China and India. (Tarun Das of the CII, N. R. Narayana Murthy ex CEO Infosys, Jamsheyd N. Godrej, Managing Director of Godrej, Jamshed J. Irani, Director Tata Sons and Gautam Thapar, CEO Avantha Group.

The Aspen Institute, is an international club of local elites, businessmen, bureaucrats, politicians, with franchises in several countries. Tarun Das is the President of the Aspen Institute, India. Gautam Thapar is Chairman. Several senior officers of the McKinsey Global Institute (proposer of the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor) are members of the CFR, the Trilateral Commission and the Aspen Institute.

The Ford Foundation (liberal foil to the more conservative Rockefeller Foundation, though the two work together constantly) was set up in 1936. Though it is often underplayed, the Ford Foundation has a very clear, well-defined ideology and works extremely closely with the US State department. Its project of deepening democracy and ‘good governance’ are very much part of the Bretton Woods scheme of standardizing business practice and promoting efficiency in the free market. After the Second World War when communists replaced fascists as the US Government’s Enemy Number One, new kinds of institutions were needed to deal with the Cold War. Ford funded RAND (Research and Development Corporation), a military think tank that began with weapons research for the US defense services. In 1952 to thwart “the persistent Communist effort to penetrate and disrupt free nations” it established the Fund for the Republic, which then morphed into the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions whose brief was to wage the cold war intelligently without McCarthyite excesses. It is through this lens that we need to view the work that the Ford Foundation is doing with the millions of dollars it has invested in India—its funding of artists, filmmakers and activists, its generous endowment of university courses and scholarships.

The Ford Foundation’s declared “goals for the future of mankind”, include interventions in grassroots political movements locally and internationally. In the US it provided millions in grants and loans to support the Credit Union Movement that was pioneered by the department store owner Edward Filene in 1919. Filene believed in creating a mass consumption society of consumer goods by giving workers affordable access to credit— a radical idea at the time. Actually, only half of a radical idea, because the other half of what Filene believed in was the more equitable distribution of national income. Capitalists seized on the first half of Filene’s suggestion, and by disbursing ‘affordable’ loans of tens of millions of dollars to working people, turned the US working class into people who are permanently in debt, running to catch up with their lifestyles.

Many years later, this idea has trickled down to the impoverished countryside of Bangladesh when Mohammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank brought microcredit to starving peasants with disastrous consequences. The poor of the subcontinent have always lived in debt, in the merciless grip of the local village usurer—the Baniya. But microfinance has corporatized that too. Microfinance companies in India are responsible for hundreds of suicides—200 people in Andhra Pradesh in 2010 alone. A national daily recently published a suicide note by an 18 year-old girl who was forced to hand over her last Rs150, her school fees, to bullying employees of the microfinance company. The note said, “Work hard and earn money. Do not take loans.”

In 1957 the Rockefeller Foundation established the Ramon Magsaysay Prize for community leaders in Asia. It was named after Ramon Magsaysay, President of the Philippines, a crucial ally in the US campaign against communism in South East Asia. In 2000, the Ford Foundation established the Ramon Magsaysay Emergent Leadership Award. The Magsayay Award is considered a prestigious award among artists, activists and community workers in India. M.S. Subulakshmi and Satyajit Ray won it, and so did Jaiprakash Narain and one of India’s finest journalists P.Sainath. But they did more for the Magsaysay award than it did for them. In general, it has become a gentle arbiter what kind of activism is ‘acceptable’ and what is not.

Interestingly, Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement last summer was spearheaded by three Magsaysay Award winners —Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal and Kiran Bedi. One of Arvind Kejriwal’s many NGOs is generously funded by Ford Foundation. Kiran Bedi’s NGO is funded by Coca Cola and Lehman brothers.

Though Anna Hazare calls himself a Gandhian, the law he called for—the Jan Lokapal Bill—was un-Gandhian, elitist and dangerous. A round-the-clock corporate media campaign proclaimed him to be the voice of ‘the people’. Unlike the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US, the Hazare movement didn’t breathe a word against privatization, corporate power, or economic “reforms”. On the contrary, its principle media backers successfully turned the spotlight away from massive corporate corruption scandals (which had exposed high profile journalists too) and used the public mauling of politicians to call for the further withdrawal of discretionary powers from government, for more reforms, more privatization. (In 2008 Anna Hazare received a World bank Award for Outstanding Public Service.) The World Bank issued a statement from Washington saying the movement ‘dovetailed’ into its policy.

Like all good Imperialists the Philanthropoids set themselves the task of creating and training an international cadre that believed that Capitalism, and by extension the hegemony of the United States, was in their own self-interest. And who would therefore help to administer the Global Corporate Government in the ways native elites had always served colonialism. So began the Foundations’ foray into education and the arts, which would become their third sphere of influence, after foreign and domestic economic policy. They spent (and continue to spend) millions of dollars on academic institutions and pedagogy.

Joan Roelofs in her wonderful book Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism describes how Foundations re-modeled the old ideas of how to teach political science, and fashioned the disciplines of ‘international’ and ‘area’ studies. This provided the US Intelligence and Security Services a pool of expertise in foreign languages and culture to recruit from. The CIA and US State Department continue to work with students and professors in US universities, raising serious questions about the ethics of scholarship.

The gathering of information to control people they rule is fundamental to any ruling power. As resistance to land acquisition and the new economic policies spreads across India, in the shadow of outright war in Central India, as a containment technique, the Government has embarked on a massive biometrics program, perhaps one of the most ambitious and expensive information gathering projects in the world— the Unique Identification Number (UID). People don’t have clean drinking water, or toilets, or food, or money, but they will have election cards and UID numbers. Is it a coincidence that the UID project run by Nandan Nilekani, former CEO of Infosys, ostensibly meant to ‘deliver services to the poor’ will inject massive amounts of money into a slightly beleaguered IT industry? (A conservative estimate of the UID budget exceeds the Indian Government’s public spending on education.) To digitize a country with such a large population of the illegitimate and ‘illegible’—people who are for the most part slum dwellers, hawkers, adivasis without land records—will criminalize them, turning them from illegitimate to illegal. The idea is to pull off a digital version of the Enclosure of the Commons and put huge powers into the hands of an increasingly hardening police state. Nilekani’s technocratic obsession with gathering data, ties is consistent with Bill Gates’ obsession with digital data bases, “numerical targets” and “scorecards of progress” as though it is a lack of information that is the cause of world hunger, and not colonialism, debt and skewed profit-oriented, corporate policy.

Corporate-endowed Foundations are the biggest funders of the socials sciences and the arts, endowing courses and student scholarships in “development studies”, “community studies”, “cultural studies”, “behavioural sciences” and “human rights”. As US universities opened their doors to international students, hundreds of thousands of students, children of the third world elite poured in. Those who could not afford the fees were given scholarships. Today in countries like India and Pakistan there is scarcely a family among the upper middle-classes that does not have a child that has studied in the US. From their ranks have come good scholars and academics, but also the Prime Ministers, finance ministers, economists, corporate lawyers, bankers and bureaucrats who helped to open up the economies of their countries to global corporations.

Scholars of the Foundations-friendly version of economics and political science were rewarded with fellowships, research-funds, grants, endowments and jobs. Those with Foundation-unfriendly views found themselves unfunded, marginalized and ghettoized, their courses discontinued. Gradually, one particular imagination—a brittle, superficial pretense of tolerance and multi-culturalism (that morphs into racism, rabid nationalism, ethnic chauvanism or war-mongering Islamophobia at a moment’s notice) under the roof of a single over-arching, very un-plural economic ideology—began to dominate the discourse. It did so to such an extent that it ceased to be perceived as an ideology at all. It became the default position, the natural way to be. It infiltrated normality, colonized ordinariness and challenging it began to seem as absurd or as esoteric as challenging reality itself. From here it was a quick easy step to ‘There is No Alternative.’

One century after it began, corporate philanthropy is as much part of our lives as coca-cola. There are now millions of nonprofit organizations, many of them connected through a byzantine financial maze to the larger Foundations. Between them, this ‘independent’ sector has assets worth nearly $450 billion. The largest of them is the Gates Foundation with ($21 billion), followed by the Lilly Endowment ($16 billion) and the Ford Foundation ($15 billion).

As the IMF enforced Structural Adjustment, and arm-twisted governments into cutting back on public spending on health, education, childcare, development, the NGOs moved in. The Privatization of Everything has also meant the NGO-ization of Everything. As jobs and livelihoods disappeared, NGOs have become an important source of employment, even for those who see them for what they were. And they are certainly not all bad. Of the millions of NGOs, some do remarkable, radical work and it would be a travesty to tar all NGOs with the same brush. However, the corporate or Foundation-endowed NGOs are global finance’s way of buying into resistance movements, literally like share-holders buy shares in companies, and then try to control them from within. They sit like nodes on the central nervous system, the pathways along which global finance flows. They work like transmitters, receivers, shock absorbers, alert to every impulse, careful never to annoy the governments of their host countries. (The Ford Foundation requires the organizations it funds to sign a pledge to this effect.) Inadvertently (and sometimes advertently) they serve as listening posts, their reports and workshops and other missionary activity feeding data into an increasingly aggressive system of surveillance of increasingly hardening States. The more troubled an area, the greater the numbers of NGOs in it.

Armed with their billions, these NGOs have waded into the world, turning potential revolutionaries into salaried activists, funding artists, intellectuals and filmmakers, gently luring them away from radical confrontation, ushering them in the direction of multi-culturalism, gender, community development— the discourse couched in the language of identity politics and human rights.

The transformation of the idea of justice into the industry of human rights has been a conceptual coup in which NGOs and Foundations have played a crucial part. The narrow focus of human rights enables an atrocity-based analysis in which the larger picture can be blocked out and both parties in a conflict—say for example the Maoists and the Indian Government, or the Israeli Army and Hamas, can both be admonished as Human Rights Violaters. The land-grab by mining corporations or the history of the annexation of Palestinian land by the State of Israel, then become footnotes with very little bearing on the discourse. This is not to suggest that human rights don’t matter. They do, but they are not a good enough prism through which to view or remotely understand the great injustices in the world we live in.

Another conceptual coup has to do with Foundations’ involvement with the feminist movement. Why do most ‘official’ feminists and women’s organizations in India keep a safe distance between themselves and organizations like say the 90,000 member Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sanghatan, (Revolutionary Adivasi Women’s Association) that is fighting patriarchy in their own communities and displacement by mining corporations in the Dandakaranya forest? Why is it that the dispossession and eviction of millions of women from land which they owned and worked is not seen as a feminist problem?

The hiving off of the liberal feminist movement from grassroots anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist peoples’ movements did not begin with the evil designs of Foundations. It began with those movements’ inability to adapt and accommodate the rapid radicalization of women that took place in the 60s and 70s. The Foundations’ showed genius in recognizing and moving in to support and fund women’s growing impatience with the violence and patriarchy in their traditional societies as well as among even the supposedly progressive leaders of Left movements. In a country like India, the schism also ran along the rural-urban divide. Most radical, anti-capitalist movements were located in the countryside where patriarchy continued to rule the lives of women. Urban women activists who joined these movements (like the Naxalite movement) had been influenced and inspired by the western feminist movement and their own journeys towards liberation were often at odds with what their male leaders considered to be their duty: To fit in with ‘the masses.’ Many women activists were not willing to wait any longer for the ‘revolution’ in order to end the daily oppression and discrimination in their lives, including from their own comrades. They wanted gender equality to be an absolute, urgent and non-negotiable part of the revolutionary process and not just a post-revolution promise. Intelligent, angry and disillusioned women began to move away and look for other means of support and sustenance. As a result, by the late 1980’s, around the time when the Indian markets were opened up, the liberal feminist movement in India had become inordinately NGOised. Many of these NGOs have done seminal work on queer rights, domestic violence, AIDS and the rights of sex-workers. But significantly the liberal feminist movement has not been at the forefront of challenging the New Economic Policies, even though women have been the greatest sufferers. By manipulating the disbursement of the funds the Foundations have largely succeeded in circumscribing the range of what ‘political’ activity should be. The funding briefs of NGOs now prescribe what counts as women’s ‘issues’ and what doesn’t.

The NGO-isation of the women’s movement has also made Western-liberal feminism (by virtue of its being the most funded brand), the standard-bearer of what constitutes feminism. The battles as usual, have been played out on women’s bodies, extruding Botox at one end and Burkhas at the other. (And then there are those who suffer the double-whammy, Botox and the Burkha.) When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burkha rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it’s not about liberating her, but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism. Coercing a woman out of her burkha is as bad as coercing her into one. It’s not about the burkha. It’s about the coercion. Viewing gender in this way, shorn of social, political and economic context, makes it an issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes. It’s what allowed the US Government to use western feminist liberal groups as moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble under the Taliban. But dropping daisy-cutters on them was not going to solve the problem.

In the NGO universe, which has evolved a strange anodyne language of its own, everything has become a ‘subject’, a separate, professionalized, special-interest issue. Community development, Leadership development, Human Rights, Health, Education, Reproductive Rights, AIDS, orphans with AIDS—have all been hermetically sealed into their own silos with their own elaborate and precise funding brief. Funding has fragmented solidarity in ways that repression never could

Having worked out how to manage governments, political parties, elections, courts, the media and liberal opinion, there was one more challenge for the neo-liberal establishment: How to deal with growing unrest, the threat of ‘peoples power.’ How do you domesticate it? How do you turn protestors into pets? How do you vacuum up peoples’ fury and re-direct it into blind alleys?

Here too, Foundations and their allied organizations have a long and illustrious history. A revealing example is their role in defusing and de-radicalizing the Black Civil Rights movement in the US in the 1960s and the successful transformation of Black Power into Black Capitalism.

The Rockefeller Foundation, in keeping with J.D. Rockefeller’s ideals, had worked closely with Martin Luther King Sr (father of Martin Luther King Jr). But his influence waned with the rise of the more militant organizations—the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations moved in. In 1970 they donated $15 million to ‘moderate’ black organizations, giving people, grants, fellowships, scholarships, job-training programs for drop-outs and seed-money for black-owned businesses. Repression, infighting, and the honey trap of funding, led to the gradual atrophying of the radical black organizations.

Martin Luther King Junior made the forbidden connections between Capitalism, Imperialism, Racism and the Vietnam War. As a result, after he was assassinated even his memory became toxic, a threat to public order. Foundations and Corporations worked hard to re-model his legacy to fit a market-friendly format. The Martin Luther King Junior Centre for Non-Violent Social Change with an operational grant of $2 million, was set up by, among others, the Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Mobil, Western Electric, Proctor and Gamble, US Steel and Monsanto. The Center maintains the King Library and Archives of the Civil Rights Movement. Among the many programs the King Center runs have been projects that “work closely with the United States Department of Defense, the Armed Forces Chaplains Board and others.” It co-sponsored the Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture Series called “ The Free Enterprise System: An Agent for Non-violent Social Change.”

Amen.

A similar coup was carried out in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. In 1978 the Rockefeller Foundation organized a Study Commission on US Policy toward Southern Africa. The report warned of the growing influence of the Soviet Union on the ANC and said that US strategic and corporate interests (i.e., access to South Africa’s minerals) would be best served if there were genuine sharing of political power by all races.

The Foundations began to support the ANC. The ANC soon turned on the more radical organizations like Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness movement and more or less eliminated it. When Nelson Mandela took over as South Africa’s first Black President, he was canonized as a living saint, not just because he is a freedom fighter who spent twenty-seven years in prison, but also because he deferred completely to the Washington Consensus. Socialism disappeared from the ANC’s agenda. South Africa’s great ‘peaceful transition’, so praised and lauded, meant no land reforms, no demands for reparation, no nationalization of South Africa’s mines. Instead there was Privatization and Structural Adjustment. Mandela gave South Africa’s highest civilian award—the Order of Good Hope—to his old friend and supporter, General Suharto, the killer of communists in Indonesia. Today in South Africa, a clutch of Mercedes driving former radicals and trade unionists rule the country. But that is more than enough to perpetuate the myth of Black Liberation.

http://www.dawn.com/2012/03/18/capitalism-a-ghost-story-2.html

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

This is the building she's referring to at the beginning. Built for one family in the middle of one of the world's densest cities and no-one even lives there. Capitalism.

she likes to talk about it: http://www.zcommunications.org/beware-the-gush-up-gospel-behind-india-s-billionaires-by-arundhati-roy

Is it a house or a home? A temple to the new India, or a warehouse for its ghosts? Ever since Antilla arrived on Altamount Road in Mumbai, exuding mystery and quiet menace, things have not been the same. “Here we are,” the friend who took me there said, “pay your respects to our new ruler.”

Antilla belongs to India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. I’d read about this, the most expensive dwelling ever built, the 27 floors, three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, ballrooms, weather rooms, gymnasiums, six floors of parking, and the 600 servants. Nothing had prepared me for the vertical lawn – a soaring wall of grass attached to a vast metal grid. The grass was dry in patches, bits had fallen off in neat rectangles. Clearly, “trickle down” had not worked.

But “gush-up” has. That’s why in a nation of 1.2bn, India’s 100 richest people own assets equivalent to a quarter of gross domestic product.

The word on the street (and in The New York Times) is, or at least was, that the Ambanis were not living in Antilla. Perhaps they are there now, but people still whisper about ghosts and bad luck, vastu and feng shui. I think it’s all Marx’s fault. Capitalism, he said, “ ... has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”.

Ironicwarcriminal posted:
to me one of the biggest crimes in India is the effective gendercide of millions upon millions of girls thanks to a liberal embrace of abortion. When Indian society starts collapsing thanks to the drastic overabundance of boys, we can point at all those well-intentioned feminists in Washington and London and know that they're the ones with blood all over their hands

abortion wasn't legalized in india because of western feminist activism, it was never effectively banned. like, never. nobody cared.

karphead posted:

i guess this just came out in book form, although i'm not sure if it's just a word for word copy or if there's addendums and shit. gonna pick it up today.

fwiw i checked out that "walking with the comrades" book by roy and it was just a word for word of the essay thats online