Brown Paper Bag
Originally published March 2012
Permanent Revolution
Arundhati Roy recently put out another rant about Capitalism and the “nexus”. In it she maligns just about everything there is. It is extremely saddening to see somebody who wrote an oh-so-beautiful novel, go ever deeper in to cynicism of this sort. Is there anything she sees as positive? Democracy on the sub-continent has had it’s longest sustained run. Art and culture find mind-space among the bourgeois. Sport is more than cricket. What is really disappointing is that she mentions the price paid, but not the product.
When Rang de Basanti came out, there was a discussion in IIT Bombay. The debating community was present in large numbers with a peppering of faculty. The argument was whether movies of that kind present a real sentiment of revolution, whether we were a generation clamoring for change. I have long been, as Ram puts it, a rebel without a cause. And I remember being the only one who believed it was just Amir Khan selling movie tickets.
Norwegians are remarkable. There is a honest sense of impunity in the air. You breathe some of it and cough. I could exploit this, you think. Then you see young single mothers, underworked overpaid employees, no incentive to do better or more. Before the assumption creeps in that I despise this place, let me clarify that I absolutely adore this place. But in a place where most people can afford not to care and not to worry, I am reminded everyday of only one thing: freedom of the intellect is not in choices we don’t make.
GUT
The world is split between the zealots, the charlatans and the indifferent.