Informative and dark. I don't know enough about dams, India, Indian politics and economies, or how it has changed in the last 25 years to verify or disprove anything in these essays. It seems to be well researched and well written though, and I have no reason to suspect it's a fabrication. It read like a John Oliver crash course in how the world is horrible - sans the comedy. It's sadly dark, but also an important insight to the democratic process and national image of one of the largest countries in the world.

I was blown away by the honesty and bravery of this women. I always remember a bit in the God of Small Things where Roy talks about the best stories being the ones “you can inhibit anywhere, where they smell like your lovers skin … and you know how they will end and yet you listen as though you don’t … you want to hear them again and again”. This was the same - i wanted to hear her words again and again. The book covers 2 essays that Roy wrote in around the late 90s.
The first one is about a massive dam that had now been built across a massive river called the Narmada in centralish India. Roy’s point is that the dam was pitched to the public as being this manna from heaven gift that would bring water to millions vie the series of canals that it would subsequently spawn and the way the dam could be used to drip feed water into the most required areas when the country was its most driest (i.e. any time outside the monsoon season when the country could rain relentlessly – Juneish to Septemberish). What the dam builders didn’t tell you was that the building of the dam and the subsequent canals would displace millions of mainly lower caste Dalit people and the aborigines of India known as the Adivasis. Roy was reeling off her success of the God of Small Things so was in an incredible position to influence and help these people which she eloquently does in the book and in this incredibly engaging documentary about the struggle of these poor people (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ2iV...). This may not seem like a huge issue to you as you are used to seeing dams but the point here was that the dam in question was one of over 3000 that was being built across this huge river. The best bits in this first essay about the Sardar Sarovar dam were:
•t“To slow a beast you break its limbs. To slow a nation you break its people”
•tHer writing style as you would expect from an international bestselling author was beautiful. The directness and simplicity with which she described what was happening in the book and the documentary was mesmerising.

The second essay came out shortly after the nuclear knob waving that was going on between India and Pakistan in the late 1990s. This essay is called end of the imagination and is a direct diatribe against the childishness with which India would on the one hand castigate the way India was blindly following western ideals like holly wood, coke and McDonalds and yet on the other hand India was blindly copying and religiously proud of the nuclear arms they had acquired and tested. Feeling proud of the bomb was akin to feeling proud of being Hindu in India and feeling uber-nationalistic. It was this nationalism that Roy talks about and worries about in this essay.
Here are some of the best bits from this second essay:
•t“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
•t“If protesting against having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain is anti-Hindu and anti-national, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic. I am a citizen of the earth. I own no territory. I have no flag. My policies are simple. I'm willing to sign any nuclear non-proliferation treaty or nuclear test ban treaty that's going. Immigrants are welcome. You can help me design our flag.”
•tThis was a stunning and simple attack against all the shite the west has done in the world. yes its done a lot of good but here’s its shite summarised in a few simple and direct sentences: “As for the third Official Reason: exposing Western Hypocrisy - how much more exposed can they be? Which decent human being on earth harbours any illusions about it? These are people whose histories are spongy with the blood of others. Colonialism, apartheid, slavery, ethnic cleansing, germ warfare, chemical weapons - they virtually invented it all. They have plundered nations, snuffed out civilisations, exterminated entire populations. They stand on the worlds stage stark naked but entirely unembarrassed, because they know that they have more money, more food and bigger bombs than anybody else.”
•t“The nuclear bomb is the most anti-democratic, anti-national, anti-human, outright evil thing that man has ever made. If you are religious, then remember that this bomb is Man's challenge to God. It's worded quite simply: We have the power to destroy everything that You have created. If you're not religious, then look at it this way. This world of ours is four thousand, six hundred million years old. It could end in an afternoon.”

Terus terang aku tertarik dengan buku ini setelah membaca resensinya di Kompas. Who is Arundhati Roy? Aku menemukan bukunya di toko buku beberapa minggu kemudian dan langsung membeli. Ulasan yang sangat bagus. Orang-orang seperti Arundhati inilah yang dapat menggiring opini ke arah yang diinginkan. Semoga mereka diberkahi sehingga dengan tulisannya mampu merubah dunia menjadi tempat yang lebih baik. Aku masih mencari buku lainnya The God of Small Thing yang belum aku temukan sampai sekarang

This book is a must read if want to read about life of adivasis and villagers when they are pushed to nation survice. It's an extention of the the Nationalism by Rabindranath Thakur( angrez call him tagore)

Though nearly 20 years old the point of these polemics still stands - and it's great to read Roy in this context, passionate, having some fun with language too, but ultimately expressing a greatly articulated rage.

I am unable to describe how important this book is and in how many ways. However most people will problably not enjoy reading this. Which is the point. You're not supposed to enjoy it, you're supposed to feel disturbed, disgusted, betrayed and inspired. I loved and disliked reading this book so i am unsure how to rate it, problably 2 or 5☆ depending on the day idk.

Talk about serendipity: this book fell into my hands just when I finished two EdX e-courses, the Australian National University introductory course to India (Engaging India) and the University of Delft Next generation infrastructures and somehow neatly bridged them.

The first essay, The Greatest Common Good, is a thought provoking attack on the politics underlying building the Sardar Sarovar dam in particular and "Big Dam" infrastructures in India in general . Roy estimates that between thirty three and fifty million people have been displaced by the building of big dams in India during the first fifty years of its independence. To put this huge number in perspective, she mentions that, at the time she wrote this, this was three times the population of Australia and three times the number of refugees created by Britain´s partition of India and Pakistan. She delves, skeptically, into the claims made for dams as means to development, their conflicting objectives, the role of the World Bank,

India is in a situation today where it pays back more money to the Bank in interest and repayment instalments than it receives from it. We are forced to incur new debts in order to repay our old ones. According to the World Bank Annual Report, last year (1998), India paid the Bank $478 million more than it borrowed. Over the last five years (1993 to 1998) India paid the Bank $1.475 billion more than it received.

pointedly analyzing who winds up getting the contracts and the benefits of such huge infrastructure projects, how the environmental impact studies done for the project were sorely inadequate, how poorly the people being displaced were compensated for the loss of their communities and livelihoods and how some government officials resort to bullying or worse:

We will request you to move from your houses after the dam comes up. If you move, it will be good. Otherwise we shall release the waters and drown you all.
[Morarji Desai, speaking at a public meeting in the submergence zone of the Pong dam in 1961]

Popular outcry managed to suspend the Sardar Sarovar dam for several years, but as Arudhati Roy correctly foretold, the project was later slowly but inexhorably carried out to completion.

This essay should be obligatory reading for all those involved in any massive infrastructure project, so that they get a feel for its true human and environmental costs and not get carried away by technological optimism.

The second essay, The End of Imagination, is a searing indictment of India´s astonishing volte face, as it turned from abstaining from developing nuclear weapons and thus enjoying the moral high ground necessary to be a leading and shining light in the nuclear antiproliferation movement to becoming a nuclear power (India exploded her first nuclear bomb in 1998 and in 2013 became the first non-permanente member of the five country UN Security Council to launch a nuclear-powered submarine). The essay is also a fascinating glimpse into the problem of defining an Indian national identity -and by extension any one national identity in times when chauvinism again seems to be on the rise- supposing one were needed:

The people who have a vital stake (or more to the point, a business interest) in India´s having a single, lucid, cohesive national identity are the politicians who constitute our national political parties. The reason isn´t far to seek, it´s simply because their struggle, their career goal, is -and necessarily must be- to become that identity.

[...]There´s no such thing as an Authentic India or a Real Indian. There is no Divine Committee that has the right to sanction one single, authorized version of what India is, or should be. There is no one religion or language or caste or region or person or story or book that can claim to be its sole representative. There are, and can only be, visions of India, various ways of seeing it -honest, dishonest, wonderful, absurd, modern, traditional, male, female. They can be argued over, criticized, praised, scorned, but not banned or broken. Not hunted down.

Arhundhati Roy is a skillful polemicist, a gadfly who asks sharp and honest questions which need to be deeply considered and not merely brushed aside in the name of expediency and "progress". She is particularly wary of the behemoth of mind-numbing State power, even in countries which cloak themselves in democratic institutions:

To slow a nation, you break its people. You rob them of volition. You demonstrate your absolute command over their destiny. You make it clear that ultimately it falls to you to decide who lives and who dies, who prospers and who doesn´t. To exhibit your capability you show off all that you can do, and how easily you can do it. How easily you could press a button and anhilate the earth. How you can start a war or sue for peace. How you can snatch a river away from one and gift it to another. How you can green a desert, or fell a forest and plant one somewhere else. You use caprice to fracture a people´s faith in ancient things -earth, forest, water, air.

Once that´s done, what do they have left? Only you. They will turn to you, because you´re all they have. They will love you even while they despise you. They will trust you even though they know you well. They will vote for you even as you squeeze the very breath their bodies. They will drink what you give them to drink. They will breathe what you give them to breathe.

This is what Roy writes against, because she believes that:

[Big dams and nuclear bombs] are both weapons of mass destruction. They´re both weapons governments use to control their own people.

Well worth reading.

• Arundhati Roy has won many international prizes for her books on fiction and the non fiction genre of her books maintains the same level of truth, transparency and clarity.
• This book comprises of essays on two expansive topics, the first one being about the construction of dams in India and how the presumed notion that dams have been crucial in the history of development in India has damaged our economy.
• The other essay is about the how the government has readily approved the Western ideology when it comes to nuclear proliferation programs and castigated anybody who stood up to this idea of an abusive and childish manner to resolve crisis.
• Sensitive topics like nationalism and development in the rural areas have been dealt with very well. The author has done an extensive research and has stated every fact accompanied with a source. I recommend this book to anyone who loves a good non fiction and savagely truthful read.

"My world has died. And I write to mourn its passing." On mega-dams and nuclear bombs, Roy's impassioned pleas are as loud and clear today as they were 17 years ago. Pleas to halt madness, consider harm, cherish humanity and earth over profit. This passion continues on.

Good, and polemic. I was introduced to Arundhati Roy in my Religion and the Environment class in college. Reading about the Sardar Sarovar made me recognize once again that I have much to learn about the world still. India is a nation with a population much larger than the United States and issues broad and diverse in scope. Roy's connection between nuclear weapon building, Big Dam building, and the both the nationalism and ideological story spinning that conjured the push for construction of the often destructive projects makes for an interesting read. I haven't been acquainted as much with Roy's fiction writing yet and I feel I should probably eventually dip into it when I have had a chance in the future to become more acquainted with the cultural, political, and historical context of India.

As a person that is mostly ignorant of the understanding of both ecological, development, and human consequences of dam building I found the Roy's passionate connection to the story to be a fascinating though not perfectly enlightening one. The colorful language in description of philosophy involved with nuclear bomb building did strike me as particularly interesting after having read On Tyranny. Infrastructure building and nationalist posturing did seem concerning signs of nursing a dangerous climate. Although Roy's occasional leaps into cynicism struck me as also facilitating a climate of fracture and potential unrest, I felt it was tempered with a good blend of love of fellow humanity and a more pure patriotism and call to solidarity.

How much would you sacrifice for your standard of living? How many other people have to suffer for your comforts?

Arundhati Roy writes a necessary polemic. Roy brings up real issues that cause real concern. Even more, she elucidates the terrible processes and ways by which governments quite simply screw over their peoples. Although the specific issues about which she writes are now slightly dated, the message remains clear and important.