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It is a massive Self that is responsible for these myriad injustices, tyrannies, exploitations which plague us all, which prevent us from pursuing a life of intellectual, moral, or spiritual purity without implicit and inescapable hypocracy–we are (I am) ultimately responsible, we are (I am) ultimately powerless.  I speak of an inclusive Self comprised of all of us who live silently or loudly within an organization of bodies complicit in its own oppressions.  This is the ego of all our egos.  It is very different from the ultimate Oversoul/Brahmin which binds us to All and then to One through our divine spirits: that Thing which is free from karma.  No, this Self is the amalgamation of all our karmas, and thereby binds itself to that Brahmin by binding all of us to materiality via injustice and despair, preventing us from even imagining a collective enlightenment.   This is the shared Self of the Polity, the self-loathing ego of humanity, at once a national, corporate, and global being comprised of all us Masters and all us Slaves.  The cruelty is that we are ultimately powerless over this Self (what can I do against all this ocean of injustice and dispair) and yet ultimately and inescapably responsible for it, for it is ourselves, not Other; its crimes are our crimes.

To be able to speak concretely, let me reference one pathology of this Self among many many that I could choose, brought to mind by this article on Rampant Racism in the Criminal Justice System on Counterpunch today.  This is nothing new, but must be constantly revisited and reminded, because this is a massive and brutal injustice being perpetrated IN OUR NAME, as citizens, whether law abiding or not.  And yet, I can do almost nothing except point to it.  Understand it.  It is our history and our legacy:

Professor Michelle Alexander concludes that it is no coincidence that the  criminal justice system ramped up its processing of African Americans just as  the Jim Crow laws enforced since the age of slavery ended.  Her book, The New  Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness sees these facts as  evidence of the new way the US has decided to control African Americans – a  racialized system of social control.   The stigma of criminality functions in  much the same way as Jim Crow – creating legal boundaries between them and us,  allowing legal discrimination against them, removing the right to vote from  millions, and essentially warehousing a disposable population of unwanted  people.  She calls it a new caste system.

Or, say this issue doesn’t bother you like it does me: choose another: coorporate control of our environment, human trafficking, war war war, poverty and inequity, and so on and on.  What of Afghanistan?  How can we ignore the documents leaked today of misery, coversion, incompetence, and collusion?  And yet, how can we act on them? we cannot.

How is a civilized individual supposed to pursue self betterment, artistic creation, spirituality and purity, when s/he recognizes his/her attachment to this political Self?  Must we intentionally and powerfully continue to cleave ourselves into Individuals and simply ignore the incredibly strong ties that bind us together–the bindings of economy, culture, government, labor? Oh, Guruji, please explain and enlighten: my mind is clouded by confusions!

In looking for my keys (aargh, where are my keys?) I pulled out my small pile of scraps and fragments that my typewriter has generated over the last few weeks.  This blog was originally conceived as a public notebook, and this post is in line with that: these fragments are totally raw, unedited, personal; they are a blend of fiction and reality; sometimes I was writing the emotional state of a fictional character in my mind, and yet I cannot hide the truth that I have been focused on vocational anxiety, and what little writing I’ve managed to eeke out of that unproductive emotion can only wallow in it pitifully.

–

THE PLATFORM OF THE SATISFACTIONIST PARTY INTERNATIONAL (DRAFT)

What is is all that is, and so it must satiate.

Since what is is all that is, any economy predicated on growth and dependent upon expansion for its health is inherently a lie.

We have been lied to by expansionist policy: humans are enveloped in finity.  We cannot escape our own skin.  And yet, we must eat.

The past has put too much energy and investment into expansion: we will turn the movement inwards, to provide sustenance for our own bellies first.

Therefore, all capital relegated into abstraction by history must be liquefied into usable material.  What is, must be made available to consumption; what was always only hypothetical must be rendered as a lie.

i e, all capital must be liquedated.

Capital that exists as human potential must be either liberated or more fully utilized.  Labor is not the only human potential.

All assets owend by previously incorporated national entities must be liquefied and fed back to the bodies politic, including all back stores of grain, inks, papers, oils, and other commodities.

In the case that assets owned by a particular national entity are human in nature, i e of an emotional or creative value, or expressed in terms of potential instilled by a process of over- and elite- education, these assets must be brought under liquified scientific scruitiny and re-administered to the intellecutal elite who will re-create value to be fed back to the Taxpayer in aspirational morale.

And so on, ad nauseum.

–

The mind has become obscured.  It can no longer differentiate passion from desire, dharma from vocation.  I am controlled, manhandled by the anxieties of desire.  I am not my situation: my days run through me as a river in the desert; I waste myself unwisely, expend myself in diversions, offer myself to those who are unworthy.  I spend energy trying to ignore myself.  I cannot sustain creation and balance.  I ebb and flow rapidly, I find myself unpredictable and unreliable; I surrender myself to myself; I bow before the ferment; I am too ready to accept faliure as fate.

Again I will try; today again I will remake myself.  I will become…

–

What truths can economies manufacture?

What productivity does anxiety wreck?

Why am I so determined to obey?  Why do I so virulently seek my own powerlessness?  What am I doing to my lungs, my body, my voice?  Oh, great risi,  advise me, I know not my dharma.  AM I to function, to languish, or to revolt?  I am comfortable with any of these, my path is not yet formed.  I get no directions from community or environs.  Individualism has taken me too far off any recognizable road.  I have something to offer any who is not myself, but I do not know who or what.  Like a child lost in a forest, I watch capitalism but cannot participate; like a child in a forest, I can walk through streets lined with mighty buildings and cannot enter any; what I call my home is a temporary shelter, a camp.  Will I reach home in this life?  Is this my desire?  Is desire what ought to guide me?  I am mighty.  This, I have never doubted.  But the nature of my expression, the manifestation of inner power in the form of a life’s work, I do not know.  I have long believed that when I am old, it will become clear what my life’s work has been.  I have never thought that I would know beforehand. I thought perhaps that it would only be a soft touch that was required from myself to enter the chute of karmic works, to begin to truly create, to feel desiring products to spin daily out from my fingertips.  Effort is worthwhile, and yet I am lazy: I have been lazy; I must soon reposition myself, delve into some rich atmosphere of intention, intention that most valuable of treasures, which brings significance to every action.

–

drive, drive that beast along.  That unyielding desire, drive it to wealth justified by art that does not lie; the forum that is a lie.  White space is expensive in this land, white walls do not come easy.  Through riches and on to death.  Through fame and on to failure.  Through love and on to war, we drive, holding drinks and passing out printed cards, we try to thrive through mimosas and martinis, barely balancing on the edge of sobriety, we drive, through convention centers of hungry eyes, through failure we drive.

Jai Jai Navia

Zed

I’ve been working on the section of my book about British colonialism in India. (if you don’t know what book I’m talking about, scroll down a few posts to the intro)

First of all, it’s interesting working on this project now in this place.  On the one hand, India feels far away in my life; on the other hand, when I write about it, it still feels like the thing I ought to be writing about; my topic.

This chapter demands that I look again at the Raj.  It’s hard not to be more interested in the historiography of the Raj than the actual history; how scholars and historians approach the period, which ended quite recently and which had a tremendous impact on the modern world in both the east and the west, and is in no way simple.  For example, I’ve been reading what Wendy Doniger says about the period in her big book “The Hindus: an Alternative History”. This is a truly brilliant and very useful book; I really appreciate what Donager has done in bringing both cohesion and complexity to my understanding of Indian history.  The whole book, I notice, is about the synthesis that history has created in India, about how every time there’s a new power structure in India, it gets incorporated with its ideas alongside the old; the Arayans incorporated themselves alongside and within the Indus Valley Civilization, the Brahmins built on the Vedas of the Arayans to create a ceremonial power structure and a new generation of holy texts; new sects and offshoots of the religion (buddhists, jains, shaivites, tantrics) created new forms of synthesis, until the Mughals came and again, there was a tremendous amount of exchange and synthesis under the Sultinates and the Mughals, who genuinely valued Hindu culture and who drew parallels and points of exchange between the two religions.  This is Doniger’s attitude until she gets to the British.  They brutally and arrogantly imposed themselves upon India.  This is the inescapable truth; they were guilty of racism, hubris, violence, economic and human slavery and exploitation.  But why do modern scholars like Doniger not feel the impulse to continue the narrative of synthesis into the colonial period?  Because it strikes too close to home; they’ll come off sounding like apologists for colonialism and orientalism, which is the tradition we all inhabit as Westerners writing about India.  It’s too politically risky for us as writers and scholars.

But nothing is monolithic.  There were Englishmen with a genuine and deep respect for Indian culture, and there were things that the British did in India that, over time, proved themselves to be positive and useful .  The British literally shaped Indian society; they dictated where and what the cities would be, built the rail lines to run between them, and brought the English language to India, which has proved to be the foundation (for better or worse) of the contemporary Indian economy.

This is the situation I’ve placed myself in, because I am arguing for the inclusion of English in the literature and culture of India.  Which is an easy position to take, since English is such a big part of the linguistic milieu of contemporary India, and because the large number of English speakers in India is the bedrock of the new Indian economy.  But while arguing for this, I need to not be dismissive of the horror of the history that brought the English language to India.  Professor Lal was, in truth, a beneficiary of colonialism–it gave him the incredible education which he continued to gain the level of scholarship and wisdom that he has attained.  But is he sensitive enough to the damage that the British did?  Am I?

I better stop writing about writing this and write it.

The mighty signifier Drugs names a narrative that births a calculated and urgent economy of fear and desire subsumed into raw desperation and dilapidation, an economy sanctioned by a bumbling civil system that we all propagate and support, a system that seems not to know what to do with the population that it created in America to exploit, and so continues to mindlessly and automatically oppress.  That mighty signifier Drugs deemphasizes and confuses the substances that it claims to signify: chemicals which interact physiologically with a Human, creating distinct physical states that should be understood medically.  Along with that material signified, Drugs points to a narrative and archetype that has been re-created in the American psyche: the violent and violating minority who profits unfairly off despair (this discourse never bothers to probe that despair, lest it be traced back to the dominant economy), the menacing cancer that preys on youth.  The violence that is packed tightly within the word is supposed to be somehow ontologically connected to the substance itself, rather than the regime that has been created by fear of that very violence.  Whether or not I like it, the significance of the word Drugs is heavily laden by a regime of anti-produductive forces that war at once from within and without marginalized American communities—a regime enacted through the legal system and justified by its own narrative.

Cocaine, for example, ruins lives.  It does so because it contains the chemical power to destroy bodies.  However, it cannot be overlooked that the most common side-effect of cocaine—seen as a social force—is chronic prison sentences.  Prison is not the prescribed treatment for any physical ailment, including addiction or withdrawal therefrom, including also poverty, malnourishment, hopelessness, abuse, or trauma.  Indeed, in the absence of prison education and rehabilitation programs, it is hard to see just what prison is prescribed to treat, as a body or as a body politic.

More likely than any salubrious effect desired, the carceral regime that is enabled by this narrative is enacted upon bodies because those bodies are Criminal, were born Criminal.  The American system was created to be exclusive and continues to be: others have said it before me, so I will boil it down to the essence: the Other is essential for the Self to be.  This is true economically: America was blatantly built on slavery.  Perhaps our economy today has less dependence on bondage labor than it once did, perhaps not,

especially if the regime of low wages and high debt is recognized for the calculated malevolent beast that it is.  Those who seek a way to opt out of that system that keeps labor desperate and cheap must be dealt with somehow.  And yet, we must get our drugs from someone.

This piece was picked up on counterpunch yesterday: http://www.counterpunch.org/bickman09172009.html

The cloak of secrecy and mendacity that covers the shadow war the United States is waging in Pakistan undermines democratic values both in the battle against the Taliban and back home. Our strategy relies on backroom deals, on proxy warriors and private mercenaries, on the complicity of a corrupt Pakistani government, on mechanized drone attacks, and on public deceit. And that’s why, when Judith McHale, the Obama Administration’s new under secretary of state for diplomacy and public affairs, arrived in Pakistan, she was told by the prominent Pakistani journalist Ansar Abbasi, “You should know that we all hate Americans. From the bottom of our souls, we hate you.”

The full extent of America’s game in Pakistan is impossible to know; it seems to have utter control over the Pakistani government under Asif Ali Zardari. Whether he was actually bought or simply believes that his only chance of staying in power is to slavishly obey American desires must remain a subject for speculation. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when Zardari met with President Obama on May 6 and 7, about twelve hours before the offensive in Swat materialized out of nothingness, or rather materialized out of a terrified army and peace treaty with the Taliban ceding the territory. That offensive created an internal refugee crisis and humanitarian disaster. Pakistanis feel that American interests are at odds with their own: America wants to annihilate the Taliban, but Pakistan needs peace and stability so that moderate and liberal elements can be fostered on a grassroots level. Clearly, Zardari has been convinced of the American point of view. But as that big picture remains stubbornly opaque to the civilian viewer, I want to turn to another battle being waged in Pakistani territory, along the Afghanistan border. Although that battle is part of the war in Afghanistan, its impact on Pakistan is overlooked and very important.

The war in the tribal areas, in the Northwest Provinces and Waziristan is primarily fought with unmanned drones, which routinely fire Hellfire missiles into homes, schools, and caves. The most recent of these attacks occurred on Tuesday, (September 8), killing ten, following one on Monday (September 7), killing six, etc. They’ve been going on for over two years, they are barely reported upon in the American media, and they have become an uncontrollable fact of life in the region. It is impossible to know how many of the casualties of these attacks are Taliban fighters; there have been high-profile targets (most notably Baitullah Meshud, a Taliban leader killed on August 5), but there have certainly innocent deaths. Providing hospitality to strangers who may or may not be Taliban fighters amounts to a death sentence under the reign of the drones—and the culture of the region prizes hospitality as a sacred duty.

The drone attacks are massively unpopular in Pakistan, and understandably so. Try, for a moment, to imagine life under the drones; they are constantly overhead, gathering intelligence, watching, and you never know when they’ll decide to strike. They’re literally inhuman, faceless, soulless—it’s straight out of science fiction—and this in a tribal, rural area where people might travel days to see a TV or a telephone. That the attacks continue uninterrupted into the holy month of Ramazan adds insult to injury.

The prevailing discourse within Pakistan is that the drones violate Pakistani sovereignty, and it’s a line that the Zardari government periodically trots out in public. The Obama administration leads us to believe that Zardari, like his predecessor, Pervez Musharraf, allows the US to operate its drones with impunity, and that the public stance is purely for the sake of public opinion. But Pakistanis aren’t as stupid as we seem to assume they are; they know that their government cannot and will not move to stop the drones. Indeed, until recently, the Pakistanis were using intelligence gathered by drones. It reveals to the world the dishonesty of the Zardari government and makes it appear (rightly) cowed and enslaved to America, further weakening support not only for this incarnation of the American puppet government in Pakistan, but also the ideal of democracy in the country. The Taliban don’t need a propaganda machine, they only need to point to the sky where the drones fly, having taken off from a base within Pakistan.

But the obfuscation isn’t limited to the Pakistani government. Both the American government and the Pakistani government refuse to publicly comment upon or confirm any of the drone attacks, as if there is some reason why the drone attacks should be beyond public debate, as if by keeping the operation classified they escape responsibility for it. Perhaps they do—through subcontracting it to private mercenaries. The New York Times recently reported that the drone operations are carried out by Blackwater, the same thugs we last saw killing and torturing Iraqis. There may be nothing technically illegal about this, but I find it deeply unsettling that our murder machines should be operated so far away from democratic institutions or public debate.

On Friday I went to a short-film festival of socially relevant films held at an NGO here.  The films were uneven, but the message of each was very clear: the first one told a typical story of women traffiking in India, a tragic and massive industry, there was a very blunt one about discrimination against Muslims in America, one about transgenderd people in India and the struggles they face (for this one I would have appriciated some audience dialogue that didn’t happen; it was clearly too graphic and uncomfortable for many members of the Bengali audience.  People were laughing, some walked out.  Homosexuality is not so much discriminated against here as…hidden).

It did strike me that the name of the event was “Black and White,” which seemed to me to be a clear reference to American racism, because the discriminations and injustices that were addressed by the films were all pretty brown-on-brown.  This was never explicitly discussed or explained, but I’ve noticed an interest in India about the various American oppressions and injustices.  On multiple occasions here I have been asked about the massacre and displacement of American Indians–for a while I speculated that this was because of the name “Indian” but I don’t think that’s it. 

There’s no inherent concept of sarcasm or irony in Indian culture, there’s no system of meaning things other than what is said.  So I think that Indians are bewildered and facinated by the hypocracies of America; we claim to be founded upon equality and freedom when we are founded upon slavery. India is explicitly founded upon slavery and inequality, the caste system.  Educated Bengalis seem to need to constantly remind themselves that what America says and what America means are two very different things.  Indian politicians spout hate and they mean hate, but American politicans spout liberation democracy and equality and mean imperialism.  In order to resist this imperialism, they must first navagate the trecherous waters of hypocracy and doublethink.

That was obviously very oversimplified and myopic.  Indian politicans totally lie all the time, for example.

And then on Saturday I went to a gathering where young poets (ten to twentyfour) read their poetry.  It was really wonderful to hear all the voices of Bengal; there was a lot of cliche, of course, but there were a few exceptional poems.  Sadly, the event was on the roof of a tall building during a rain storm, so I couldn’t stay long–I was too cold.

Though I haven’t been so regular about keeping up the blog, if you are tuned in now I promise a lot of good media coming down the tube; the much promised picture post will happen whenever I plug my laptop into the internet. And I’ve got a chunk of fiction coming down the pipeline.  So bear with me.

Blogging’s been flagging recently.  Because I’ve regained daily humanity; I’ve stopped traveling in India and I’ve begun to live in Lake Gardens, Kolkata.  Which is as good as life can be.  I feel part of a community like never before-after a whirlwind week of introductions, I know all my neighbors, am a familiar face to a few vegitable sellers at the market, not to mention a really cool and expanding  circle of expats.  I have some sort of schedule and routine.   I usually wake up early, at 6.30 or 7.  Three days so far I’ve gone running around the lake.  I’m beginning a morning yoga class on Monday.  I have to be back by 7.45 so that a shirtless guy in a seethrough lungi can toss a packet of milk into my hands as soon as I open the door for him.  Futz about until Rohit gets here–he’s the guy who sits aimlessly in my apartment all day during working hours; he’s the employee of my landlord.  For a few days I floated the theory that while he wasn’t my servant, he might end up doing some things for me, but that’s not the case at all.  He pretty much tells me what to do in a vaguely maternal but monosyllabic way–wash dish tub, etc.,  I have a strong suspicion, though, that he does sweep the floors.  As soon as possible, I leave and go down to my desk on the varandah of the Lal house (next door to my apartment building).  Since I don’t have a laptop, I’m pretty much aimlessly reading Writer’s Workshop books during the day, browsing the collection.  And working on my Bangla, which the guys who work in WW (running the warehouse and bookstore), help me with.  They’re hilarious people, each with very strong personalities, and very friendly, and speak very little English.  I’m pretty much learing Bengali for their sake.  I get bored and mosquito bitten pretty quickly, so at two I go visit the printer, who is overseeing my laptop repair.  Etc. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the dramatic Fall of America, been following the news closely, and simultaneously educating myself about the political situation here, imagining what path India’s rise will take.  I have been reading about the Naxalite movement here–Maoist rebels that control a huge swath of India’s agricultural interior.  The book that  you should read, that I’m reading, is Red Sun by Sundeep Chakravarti.There is, literally, a violent revolution amassing within India.  Because of the dramatic inequity of India’s development, not just in terms of economic numbers, but also culturally.  Urban India, Middle-Class India, are on a totally different planet from the vast majority of India’s landmass, full of people who are finding the aeons-old struggle to survive harder and harder.  I genuinely expect that the Maoists will come to power in India in the post-America(n power) epoch.  Of course, this is unlikely to slow the economic rise or alleviate the inequity.  If anything, it’ll make everyone poorer.  I imagine that a  CPI(M) India would look something like today’s china–somehow using Communist ideas to fuel and sustain a massive capitalism founded on mass labor, free of any morality, but probably more corrupt.  Remeber that I’m writing about things that I don’t understand, am not a part of,etc.

I’ve been lagging on the blog because I’ve been writing a lot of fiction on my typewriter, and am actually feeling blissfully predigital and imaginative.  When I get my laptop back, that’ll change.  I’ll do my big picture posting, first of all.

The plastic cosmos

will outlast its makers.

At least,

something ought to

                             outlast plastic-

                                                     asphalt will not.

nor,

cloathing nor terabytes.

Nor,

LANDfills of silent machinery,

quiet LANDmines

                         waiting for

                                        a human’s heavy step.

OUTlast?

    I will not, My body says.

    I will, I say.

I WILL the rot.

-

So I find it difficult to avoid discussion of the dissolution of America, in conversations and in writing.  Starting with the financial issues–should Indians really expect to live in a world where America has little power?  How soon?  I have my own ideas, but I’m far away, I find it difficult to imagine already.  I follow news closely, of course, but I have no sense of what the tone is in your life over there.  If you read this, please comment and let me know…anything.  What your sense of the situation is.  If this thing has touched your life in any way already. Are people getting fired?  Your friends?  The election is the election, I’m just as plugged into that nt’l dialogue here as I was there.  But not so much with everything else.  Help me out here.

I thought that since it’s Gandhi’s birthday, I’d write a bit on some of the politics that’s getting ignored during all this financial crisis rigamarole.

First of all, while the congress is fighting over the bailout package, they’re also pushing through the nuclear deal with India.  Why they’re doing this all of the sudden right now, while all this other sh*t’s going on, I don’t know.  The deal will drastically increase the “legitimate” nuclear capacity of India, and will solidify the political relationship between the two countries.  All of which calls to mind Sarah Palin flirting with the new president of Pakistan: is reliance on America enough to keep that conflict at bay for the time being?  Maybe.  We’ll have to see what goes down in Pakistan; hopefully the Mariott hotel attack will lead to a domestic terrorism crackdown in Pakistan, which would please everyone.

Speaking of terrorism, India’s mad these days.  At the risk of scaring my mother, there’s significantly more fear running through the streets these days than there was last time I was in India.  Almost every daily edition of the Times of India brings another histrionic report of violence or terrorism, followed up by articles in the Culture section about “Is the boy you’re bringing home to your Mother really a terrorist?”  Every time I use a cybercafe, I not only have to provide my passport, which is either copied or scanned and put on file, but also my kolkata and america address (and woe to me if I didn’t have a kolkata address), and on one occasion a full set of fingerprints.  Every-other-time I go on the metro, the army searches my bag.  But (not to jinx it, knock on wood), Kolkata has recently been pretty safe, and historically (and currently) there has been very little Hindu-Muslim tension in this city.  What can I say?  The environment of fear is destructive and silly, and many people are wisely resisting it.  A good Hindu doesn’t fear what can’t stopped.  But even whispered rumors of a terrorist attack in Jodhpur caused a stampede that killed 100 people yesterday, many more than most explosions cause.  This was at the fort I visited on my last trip, a place of great majesty and beauty, a place that has withstood thousands of years of violence.  It was not terror that caused that, but fear.

I’ve gone and depressed myself.  It’s raining so I’m just rambling.  What’s important is that today everyone remembers the spirit of Gandhiji and the secular unity in India that he stood for.

I  want to revisit the issue of Tata motors now that I’m here.  It looks more certain that the company is going to pull its factory out of West Bengal.   The issue hasn’t cleared up for me at all.

At base, this conflict is representative of a massive fissure in the reality of India.  The India of renowned economic might is all smooth marble, slicked hair, alchohol, etc., and is completely beyond anything that any pesant or laborer would recognize.  The humanity of the countryside, the labor of subsistance whichhas sheparded India  through thousands of years.

‘Development’ always proceeds by displacement, which is more or less violent.  And this is utterly value neutral; the desire that drives us ‘forward’ cannnnot be stopped for anything.  Of course America was built  on the backs  of slaves and the blood of Natives.   Could it have been otherwise?

If India looks tto her gods and ancient stories for guidance on this, she won’t find the message of tolerance you might expect.  When the Pandavas, the good guys of the Mahabarata, were sent into exile for fourteen years, they wandered through the forest looking for a place to live.  When they came upon a village, Arjun-the hero-and Krishna (yes, THE Krishna) slaughtered every man, woman, and child in the village.  They only  left alive a single snake.  That snake lived to kill Arjun’s grandson,  and so the cycle continues.  I asked Prof. Lal why Arjun and Krishna committted such atrocities, when we are supposed to revere them as ideal men.  He said that they needed somewhere to live in exile.  Within the great dance of Shiva, there are an infinity of smaller destructions, and all we can do is hope that we are the destroyers and not the destroyed.

This is not to come down on the side of Tata and the government, not to justify their actions.  The whole thing was terribly handled.  Tata didn’t need to build their factory on prime farmland, especially given the world food crisis.  There was a sight literally 600 yards away, across the highway, that no one would have disputed if they built their factory there.

To be clear: the failure of this factory really spells the end of new industrial investment in this region. Common knowledge among the coorporate world is that W. Bengal is too enmired in politics and corruption to do business in, and this proves that wisdom correct.  This is why Calcutta looks like Calcuttta and Delhi and Bombay look  like Delhi and Bombay.

And as America collapses, I think it’s right for India to ask whether rapid industrialization is a sustainable way of thriving.  And this project especially is quesionable: the project was to build a car that cost 1 lakh ruppees, about 3000 dollars, the cheapest car ever.  Do India’s streets really need that many more cars?  Emphatic NO. These streets are trecherous and conjested.  And understand about honking in this country: Indian drivers constantly HONK, simply to announce their presence.  I don’t think that TATA left the horn off of their car.

Mamata, the opposition leader who has caused all this controvercy, is the leader of the *RightWing* opposition to the Marxist state government, which would do Anything to keep Tata in W. Bengal.   She’s counting on the disaffection of the peasents to rally up support for a massive right-wing coup in this state.  We’ll see how it goes.

Meanwhile, I’m still doing fine.  I started reorganizing The Book Nook today.