Throwing down the gauntlet
By Sean-Paul Kelley
Indian activist Arundhati Roy pursues her indictment of globalization in thoughtful conversations with David Barsamian
What I remember most about India is the heat and the crowds. It's the kind of heat that claws at your lungs and squeezes every last drop of sweat from your pores. All the while, you're fighting crowds of loud, exuberant people. Sadhus and snake charmers dance around while shopkeepers shout and rickshaws dodge the cows meandering in the streets: It's the kind of unrelenting urban raucousness that either drives a person insane or to a higher level of consciousness. This is the environment that Arundhati Roy, the controversial Indian activist and writer, grew up in. Perhaps this is why she is, in her own words, "an extremely troublesome citizen."
The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile is a new a collection of interviews with Roy conducted by David Barsamian, producer of the award-winning syndicated radio program Alternative Radio. His subject will challenge and assault the reader's well-guarded assumptions, but The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile is not a polemic: It is a thinker's book, one sadly out of place in today's jingoistic and ideologically driven politics. It's full of passion, nuance, and insight. It's also an easy read. The prose is smooth, conversational, and rich with the sugary colloquialisms of Indian English.
The four interviews that form this compact book take place over the course of three years, beginning in February 2001 and ending shortly after the "major combat operations" phase of the Iraqi-American war. Barsamian is a skillful interviewer, drawing out the most engaging and provocative aspects of Roy's character. His questions are open-ended enough to allow Roy to move effortlessly from corporate power and personal responsibility to the market's impact on democracy, following it up with a stirring observation about her experiences in the U.S.
There is one key issue to which Roy continually returns. "The further and further away geographically decisions are taken, the more scope you have for incredible injustice," she says. She details many examples, including the 56 million people displaced by India's dam-building project, in a country with no official resettlement policy.
The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile:
Conversations with Arundhati Roy
Interviews by David Barsamian
South End Press
$16, 178 pages
ISBN: 0896087115
Befitting an Indian in the tradition of Gandhi, Roy is at her most eloquent when discussing personal responsibility versus power in the framework of globalization and its institutions such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization: "How do you break down this [increasingly] centralized and undemocratic process of decision making? How do you make sure that ... people have power over their lives and natural resources?"
Roy accuses Americans of ignoring the world at large and the implications of our foreign policy by oversimplifying them into pieties such as "they just hate our freedoms." As Roy describes us, our lives revolve around work, reality TV, Fox News, and sleep. "You don't know what the American government is up to and most ordinary people are too tired to make the effort," she says. She argues that terrorism is a political act, moored in strategy, not only hatred, and that to settle the conflict in which we are now engaged will require more politics and less bombs.
Roy's book ultimately challenges us to be better citizens: not docile and obedient, but independent and informed. Conservative or liberal, this book asks you to think more, do more, and try to understand the consequences of your actions, no matter how insignificant you might think they are. •
By Sean-Paul Kelley
