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Hardcover Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers Book

ISBN: 160846024X

ISBN13: 9781608460243

Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers

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Book Overview

"Gorgeously wrought...pitch-perfect prose...In language of terrible beauty, she takes India's everyday tragedies and reminds us to be outraged all over again."--Time Magazine

Combining fierce conviction, deft political analysis, and beautiful writing, this is the essential new book from Arundhati Roy.

This series of essays examines the dark side of democracy in contemporary India. It looks closely at how religious majoritarianism, cultural nationalism, and neo-fascism simmer just under the surface of a country that projects itself as the world's largest democracy.

Roy writes about how the combination of Hindu Nationalism and India's neo-liberal economic reforms, which began their journey together in the early 1990s, are now turning India into a police state.

She describes the systematic marginalization of religious and ethnic minorities, the rise of terrorism, and the massive scale of displacement and dispossession of the poor by predatory corporations. She also offers a brilliant account of the August 2008 uprising of the people of Kashmir against India's military occupation and an analysis of the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai.

Field Notes on Democracy tracks the fault-lines that threaten to destroy India's precarious democracy and send shockwaves through the region and beyond.

Praise for Field Notes on Democracy:

"In her searing account of the actual practice of the world's largest democracy, Arundhati Roy calls for 'factual precision' alongside of the 'real precision of poetry.' Remarkably, she combines those achievements to a degree that few can hope to approach. Roy shows in painful detail how the beneficiaries of the highly admired 10 percent growth rate are enjoying a 'new secessionism, ' leaving the great majority languishing in poverty and despair, with malnutrition reaching the same levels as sub-Saharan Africa. As surveillance and state terror extend, all under the guise of flourishing democracy, India is becoming 'a nation waiting to be accused, ' a nation where a confession extracted under torture can lead to the brink of nuclear war, and where 'fascism's firm footprint has appeared' in ways reminiscent of the early years of Nazism. Most chilling of all is that much of the grim portrait is all too familiar in the West. Roy asks whether our shriveled forms of democracy will be 'the endgame of the human race'--and shows vividly why this is a prospect not to be lightly dismissed." --Noam Chomsky

"After so much celebratory salesmanship about India the 'emerging market, ' Roy draws us into India the actual country, peeling away the gloss until we are confronted with perhaps the most challenging question of our time: who and what are we willing to sacrifice in the name of development? Roy is one of the most confident and original thinkers of our time."
--Naomi Klein

"The notion of Democracy and the pleading for human compassion first came together in Sophocles and the Greek tragedies. More than two thousand years later we live under an economic world tyranny of unprecedented brutality, which depends upon the systematic abuse of words like Democracy or Progress. Arundhati Roy, the direct descendant of Antigone, resists and denounces all tyrannies, pleads for their victims, and unflinchingly questions the tragic. Reflect with her on the answers she receives from the political world today." --John Berger

Arundhati Roy is a world-renowned Indian author and global justice activist. From her celebrated Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things to her prolific output of writing on topics ranging from climate change to war, the perils of free-market development in India, and the defense of the poor, Roy's voice has become indispensable to millions seeking a better world.

Customer Reviews

5 ratings

a must read

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

Beyond awesome

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.

a must read

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.

A thought-provoking read

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.

Obituary for Democracy

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."
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