Arundhati Roy's the damning criticism of India's megadams should prove extremely relevant to the Philippine context where the government continues to push for the same development projects that displace the poor while only benefiting the affluent and their foreign business partners.

It was very affecting reading about all the horrible things dams do and then looking it up to see that the project did go through

By happy coincidence, a friend of mine lent me this book right as I was in the middle of another - James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, a collection of case studies on the disasters of 20th century state planning. Coincidence because Arundhati Roy’s The Cost of Living may well have fit as yet another chapter in that book; Happy because of the exhilaration of the read, at once engrossing and distressing. The comparison is a disservice though. Where Scott is scholarly and measured, Roy is passionate and partisan: the India she writes of is her India, and she speaks as an insider to it, no less a champion for it. To bear witness, as much as to inform is the goal here, and oh, what witnessing there is to have borne.

Comprised of what are effectively two pamphlets - one on the construction of the gigantic Sardar Sarovar dam in Northwest India, the other on the occasion of the country's successful 1998 nuclear tests - The Cost of Living bristles with a rage tempered - only just - by the cutting gracefulness of Roy’s pen. The essays here are aphoristic; disjunct paragraphs of facts and vignettes splayed about one after the other, with single-line sentences and dangling words lopping off passages for punchy effect. While the stamp of the twenty year distance from its publication date makes itself felt every now and then, Roy’s ability is just in telescoping the issues discussed into the glare of the present, reminding us that these then-regional, now-historical issues are anything but.

Take what she says on nuclear bombs for instance: “It is such supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they’re used. The fact that they exist at all, their very presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to imagine. [They] pervade our thinking. Control our behaviour. Administer our societies. Inform our dreams. They bury themselves like meat hooks in the base of our brains”. First - gorgeous and terrifying. Second - it’s true right? In the face of ecological collapse, global pandemics, and economic immiseration, doesn't the bomb’s looming and unconscious presence decisively shape how and to what extent we can respond to it all? At the very least, the provocation ought to prick.

As for the essay on Sardar Sarovar - in fact, the much larger of the two included here - well in truth, anyone in the global South will have heard, if not this story, than one like it before. A conjunction of predatory international finance, the greed of local agribusiness, and a government intent on a Big Shiny Infrastructure project, all the better to identify with the Nation itself. In the words of (India's first Prime Minister) Jawaharlal Nehru, "Dams are the temples of modern India". And the price of worship? Villages displaced, soils silted, forests flooded, crops claimed - all in all, lives sunk. At least 50 million of them, by Roy's modest calculations (just... linger on that figure a minute). And yet The Cost of Living still stands as singular testimony nonetheless. Not only as a model and harbinger of things yet to come, but as a witness statement that still dares us to honor it with an alternative future.

A Note: the two essays here are also collected in Roy's The Algebra of Infinite Justice. One would probably do better to pick that up, insofar as it includes a bunch of Roy's other contemporaneous writing. I just happened to have been given this particular book.

Everyone must read this book! Her writing is poetic, and compelling. She displays complex political situations in such a light that you cannot help but laugh at the reality that is, and cry at her description of what should be. Arundhati was politically blacklisted and cannot return to her home in India as a result of these essays.

This book is comprised of two short essays on the state of India. One a commentary on India developing nuclear weaponry, and the other a look at the building of a large dam in western India.

The naked truth of people suffering with gigantism who became the cause of a gigantic disaster never ever to lift up. Exposed but the disaster to be carried for next era and we remain as helpless spectators of the ongoing.

If you’re looking for a scathing review of India’s corruption and a social justice platform for displaced indigenous people, look no further. It was hard to get through, as the many layers of injustice placed upon the Adivasi as the government of India built hundreds of dams and flooded their lands, sending them to slums.
If you’re also looking for an impassioned argument against nuclear weapons, you have a compelling essay too.
Since this was written at the turn of the 21st century, I wonder how India has fared since? Roy’s writing is biting and real and only lightly restrained for politeness. Her positions are air-tight without losing any of their passion.

She writes with wit and tragedy, these essays are not in an academic style and are accessible and understandable for basically anyone. She writes about the dualities and paradoxes of India in a similar way to Gita Mehta, using symbolism like Coke and Krishna. These were environmental and social essays focusing on the impact of dams and nuclear weaponry on Adivasis and regional peoples

a very short yet comprehensive view into the narmada valley sardar sarovar dam construction. insights on the indian experience of development aid. its shortcomings in the late 1980s and early 1990s. very impressed with the changes in environmental impact assessments (EIA) and considerations for project affected persons (PAP) since then.

These are two amazing essays on India. They are sad, thought-provoking, and powerful.

Passionate, intense, truthful, Roy is kicking ass with just being in your face honest.

It's really important that writer's like her can write about something as technical as building dams but make it a call to revolt. That takes a true talent in writing and is of infinite value.

And nuclear bombs...the fact that we're still discussing them at all is disturbing. They are pure evil and should all be gotten rid of the US should pay for its war crimes on Japan and should lead the way in disarmament.

damn dams

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