Only read two chapters/essays for a University class, The greater common good and the End of Imagination. Both of them were very interesting and instructive, it taught me new things about the dam problem in India and the general fear of nuclear war.

Arundhati Roy writes this extremely well, we can definitely feel her rage and frustration in the text.
I might read the full novel at some point.

And a small quote that I think will stay with me for a moment:

« This world of ours is four thousand, six hundred million years old.

It could end in an afternoon. » p.93

Many a time we just look towards our achievements and completely disregard the consequences faced by them who got to suffer for it. This book contains two such incidences, and in both you'll find fair shares of illustration which would make you contemplate about the incidence all over again.

One quote from the book:
"To slow a beast, you break its limbs. To slow a nation, you break its people. You rob them of volition."

I think this book is better thanthe more popular, God of Small Things. I guess its apples & oranges to say that but her writing manages to be extremely beautiful and also so powerful that you want to drop what you're doing and go to India to stop dam-building. The second part about the bomb will take your breath away.

I had no idea the dam business was so prevalent and ruthless, I should have guessed under capitalism but this is truly shocking.

In the second essay I throughly enjoyed Roy’s more philosophical take on nuclear weapons and what this means for humanity both spiritually and environmentally.

Two really great essays that raise a lot of questions and cause the heart to wrench.

Two long essays about the Big Bad Indian government and its nuclear program and village-devastating large dams.
She's my hero - I don't hand that title out to many.

This is the third book I have read by Arundhati Roy. As always, she is an amazing writer. Clear, concise, quick to the point, sharp, and witty. Her writing imparts a sense of urgency - a rallying call to arms and action. Too often, the content of what she writes leaves one with their blood boiling and in a wave of utter disillusionment and despair. That is intended, I believe, but it should not allow the overshadow the message of action for she sheds ample light on those fighting for their rights and brings their cause - which should be our cause - from the shadows of obscurity.

A powerful, angry and eye opening picture of two important issues plaguing modern India, the state's suicidal desire to build dams that have no benefit and it's even more suicidal desire to obtain nuclear weapons. With a razor sharp wit and a heart full of righteous indignation, Arundhati takes a scalpel to the dams of India and peels back the motivations behind these seemingly pointless monstrosity, implicating Indian officials, the World Bank and more.

A very breezy read (it's really two longform magazine articles stapled together) but an essential one for a brief peak into the complex world of Modern India.

Badly written and just not a good book.

There's something about Arundhati Roy's prose that causes her writing to hit your senses. After reading The God of Small Things, I picked up a few books of her essays, whose topics cover a wide range of material. My favorite essay is in this collection - The Cost of Living - and it is titled "The End of Imagination."

Arundhati Roy’s work is the polemic we need. These are discussions we need to have. A lot of what she talks about happened when I was very young. None of this was talked about in school or college or anywhere else. Mine was a generation that never knew of the sheer scale of the damage caused by our post-Independence nation building. It was spoken off as plain progress sans human or environmental annihilation in our textbooks.

Development always has a cost. Is development when done by taking lives or marginal native communities, worth it? Is this the nature of growth we’re looking for?

Two great essays that were printed in Indian newspapers. One on India's nuclear capabilities and the other on dams. Roy is a wry, clever writer and adds rage and sdaness to those traits as she castigates the indian government and society for their failures. Radical writing at its best.

As said in the description, this book has Arundhati Roy taking on two issues which she sees as deluding us into a false sense of national pride: Dams and the nuclear bomb.
For someone like me who belongs to the upper middle class, dams and the protests surrounding them just remain as headlines I glance through and end up not giving a second thought about. The fact that the idea that the advantages of a dam far outweigh its disadvantages is a tenet that holds true for comparatively privileged people like me struck me emphatically by going through the first essay of the book. The gross injustice being done to those affected by the construction of a dam in the name of the greater good and the scale of the injustice was something I had to encounter on account of this book.
Her second essay was more of a mixed experience for me. Her paranoia with regards to the nuclear tests and its success was, at least for me, slightly far-fetched though not entirely unlikely. I do agree with her sentiment that those who do not go about thumping their chests with the success of the bomb being labelled anti-national is a mockery of democracy. The observation of the intolerance of the government to it being criticized eerily rings true even today, even though this book was written in 1999.
Overall a lucid, crisp polemic by an author who didn't rest on her laurels despite the adulation that she gained almost overnight; an aspect I find worth appreciating.