Get Free Ebook Walking with the Comrades, by Arundhati Roy
This Walking With The Comrades, By Arundhati Roy is extremely correct for you as newbie visitor. The users will consistently begin their reading practice with the preferred motif. They might not consider the author and publisher that create guide. This is why, this book Walking With The Comrades, By Arundhati Roy is truly ideal to read. Nonetheless, the concept that is given in this book Walking With The Comrades, By Arundhati Roy will certainly show you lots of things. You could begin to like also reading up until the end of the book Walking With The Comrades, By Arundhati Roy.
Walking with the Comrades, by Arundhati Roy
Get Free Ebook Walking with the Comrades, by Arundhati Roy
Walking With The Comrades, By Arundhati Roy. Give us 5 mins and we will certainly show you the very best book to read today. This is it, the Walking With The Comrades, By Arundhati Roy that will certainly be your ideal choice for better reading book. Your five times will not invest lost by reading this internet site. You can take guide as a source making much better concept. Referring guides Walking With The Comrades, By Arundhati Roy that can be situated with your needs is at some time hard. Yet below, this is so easy. You could locate the very best point of book Walking With The Comrades, By Arundhati Roy that you could read.
When obtaining this e-book Walking With The Comrades, By Arundhati Roy as reference to read, you could get not just inspiration however likewise new understanding and sessions. It has greater than usual perks to take. What type of book that you review it will serve for you? So, why should obtain this e-book qualified Walking With The Comrades, By Arundhati Roy in this write-up? As in link download, you can obtain the publication Walking With The Comrades, By Arundhati Roy by on the internet.
When obtaining the e-book Walking With The Comrades, By Arundhati Roy by on the internet, you could read them anywhere you are. Yeah, also you remain in the train, bus, hesitating checklist, or various other places, on-line e-book Walking With The Comrades, By Arundhati Roy could be your buddy. Whenever is a great time to review. It will enhance your expertise, enjoyable, amusing, lesson, and encounter without investing even more money. This is why on-line publication Walking With The Comrades, By Arundhati Roy ends up being most really wanted.
Be the first which are reading this Walking With The Comrades, By Arundhati Roy Based on some factors, reading this e-book will supply even more benefits. Also you have to review it tip by action, web page by web page, you can finish it whenever and also wherever you have time. Once much more, this on-line publication Walking With The Comrades, By Arundhati Roy will certainly offer you simple of checking out time and task. It also supplies the encounter that is budget friendly to get to as well as get greatly for much better life.
From the award-winning author of The God of Small Things comes a searing frontline expos� of brutal repression in India
In her latest book, internationally renowned author Arundhati Roy draws on her unprecedented access to a little-known rebel movement in India to pen a work full of earth-shattering revelations. Deep in the forests, under the pretense of battling Maoist guerillas, the Indian government is waging a vicious total war against its own citizens-a war undocumented by a weak domestic press and fostered by corporations eager to exploit the rare minerals buried in tribal lands. Roy takes readers to the unseen front lines of this ongoing battle, chronicling her months spent living with the rebel guerillas in the forests. In documenting their local struggles, Roy addresses the much larger question of whether global capitalism will tolerate any societies existing outside of its colossal control.
- Sales Rank: #375811 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Penguin (Non-Classics)
- Published on: 2011-10-25
- Released on: 2011-10-25
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.45" h x .61" w x 5.48" l, .40 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 220 pages
Features
Review
“A bell-clear expos� of corporate greed and governmental malfeasance that should--if there is any justice in the world--provoke a furious backlash in the name of human dignity.” --KIRKUS REVIEWS (starred review)
About the Author
Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things, winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize. She has produced numerous works of political commentary and investigative journalism, including The Algebra of Infinite Justice, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, and Listening to Grasshoppers. She lives in New Delhi, India.
Most helpful customer reviews
36 of 39 people found the following review helpful.
India colonizes itself
By GregJS
As a westerner, my main interest in India has been her spiritual heritage - mainly yoga and Hinduism. Ahimsa - non-violence - is one of the main principles of these spiritual systems. And since I have considered spirituality to be "universal truth," I have held ahimsa to be universally applicable, assuming that all people, in all situations, should practice non-violence. I thought the examples of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. clearly demonstrated how non-violence really can win in any situation. I remember driving - as a spiritual tourist - through certain parts of India where the hammer-and-sickle communist symbol was a regular sight, and thinking to myself, in my naive, simplistic morality, "How sad that even here - in pure and holy India - they have all this nasty political bickering and fighting!" I had no idea what was actually going on underneath the surface of my "pure and holy India."
Now, after reading Arundhati Roy's Walking With The Comrades, I at least have an inkling about what is going on underneath the surface - and it is very, very ugly. Huge corporations that control (i.e., own) the politicians, the media, and the police/military want the mineral and resource-rich land where India's tribal people are still attempting to live their lives. Those corporations will stop at nothing to get it. Their only view of the world is that it should be exploited to the maximum degree possible - for profit. As a result, all over India, they have wreaked environmental disaster and have displaced untold numbers of people, sending them to live in shantytowns on the outskirts of cities (I have seen them, and they are shockingly squalid) or hiring them as cheap semi-slaves who have no real rights or security and no real access to education or medical care. They have rigged the entire political-economic-military system in their favor in order to be able to do this. In the eastern part of the country, one group has arisen that has had some success defending tribal peoples against the encroachments of the corporations: the communist, Maoist Naxalites. And they do it by fighting - and killing - with guns.
At great risk, Roy embedded herself with a group of forest-dwelling Naxalites and describes their day-to-day lives, their organization, their history, and the ways they have been deceptively misportrayed in the corporate-owned media. Along the way, she humanizes people who have only ever been portrayed as bloodthirsty terrorists, showing them to be real, often lovely, and very dignified, deeply community-minded people fighting for real, human values; people who simply want to be allowed to live their lives. Roy also makes a larger point that concerns us all: wherever tribal peoples are killed off, we lose the people "who still know the secrets of sustainable living."
Roy's book has confronted me - more squarely than ever before - with the stark reality of people living right at this moment, in the so-called "democratic world," who have no choice but to fight and kill or else be wiped out. Can any of us in the west imagine having to face this choice? In this reality, which I have never wanted to look at or even be aware of, there is a clear and obvious difference between the ridiculously wealthy corporations - who kill in order to make themselves even more ridiculously wealthy - and the Naxalites and tribal peoples - who kill only to stop others from either running them off their land (which amounts to killing them) or outright killing them. These are two totally different - almost opposite - forms of violence.
So, would my cherished, universal, spiritual non-violence work for these tribal peoples? I cannot say for sure, but Roy suggests not, and I think I believe her. Ahimsa may be an inviolable spiritual principle; but it may not apply in the perverse reality created by corporatism-gone-mad (which is the only form of it there seems to be).
I'll end with the reflection that, here in America, the exact same forces are at play, only in a slightly different key. Here, large corporations, who also own the politicians, the media, and the pepper-spray-happy police/military, are a bit more polished and restrained. They do not dislocate and kill us in as obvious and blatant a way as they do in India and other parts of the world. This gives us the illusion of having more of a choice in how to respond to them - or even to not respond at all. Maybe non-violent, political resistance makes sense here, at least for now (where at least we have some corporate-free news shows like DemocracyNow! - where I learned about this book - to give fair coverage to such non-violent resistance). But as corporate power continues to grow over here, maybe we should keep the Naxalites in mind - and even view them as, dare I say it, our comrades.
Maybe I'm still being na�ve - but probably less so than before I read this powerful book.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
A Compelling and Hard Hitting Book
By S. Duke
There's something stirring in India. A specter, if you will, of a dark time arisen and a dark time to come. Whether we call it capitalism, corporatism, or new (neo) Imperialism, the fact remains that those most affected by the shifting dynamics of contemporary industrialization will be the disenfranchised and the disinherited.
Arundhati Roy's (The God of Small Things, etc.) Walking with the Comrades waltzes straight into this new Indian world with passion and focus, chronicling her journey into the forests of India where Maoists and the few remaining indigenous people have dug in their heels. Each new day brings her closer to the heart of the movement that has set India's government on fire, spawning new counter-revolutionary police forces and new regulations and laws to strip people of their land for corporate profit. In the process, she crafts a disturbing narrative of the new Indian state, one
which will seem suspiciously familiar to Americans who know a little about the United States' history with the Native Americans.
Walking with the Comrades is a quick read, though by no means an easy one. Roy spends considerable time setting the stage for her walk with the Maoist "revolutionaries" in the forests of India. She provides cogent analyses of the Indian government's old and new programs for stifling dissent, the language they use, and the results of their activities. Likewise, she explores the history of communism in India, leading us through suppression, violent acts, revolts, and the mindset of the people on the ground -- the very comrades with which she walks. Walking with the Comrades, as such, is part of the grand tradition of travel narratives, but it is also an expansion of Roy's long and distinguished career as a novelist and cultural critic.
And it's the travel narrative aspect which is most compelling. True, Walking with the Comrades is about the political and economic situation in contemporary India, but it also an attempt to put a face on the great "security threat" of India. It's a clever tactic, because understanding that there are humans behind the mask of terror forces us to think about who we are fighting against, and why they are resisting. In the case of India, the Maoists are fighting a government that wants communism in all its forms destroyed, and the indigenous people protected by Maoists -- even if only for political gain -- moved off and adapted for industrial society -- at the expense of their traditions, native lands, etc. To realize who the Maoists are is to make blind faith to India's new cultural projects impossible, if not because we care about the Maoists and their goals -- most of us in the U.S. likely do not because we have a tendency to be ruthlessly anti-communist here -- then at least because we understand why they are doing what they do. Perhaps it's the optimist in me thinks that maybe reasonable compromise can be found in this cesspool of violence and hatred if only we can see the humanity in everything.
Still, some might be willing to dismiss Roy's work simply because she often provides polemics and doesn't seem altogether genuine when she concedes points to the opposition; in the case of Walking with the Comrades, Roy occasionally tries to suggest that the Indian government might have a solid rationale for some of their actions, yet the overwhelming majority of the book rips India to shreds, thereby weakening the conciliatory gesture. But to dismiss the book for this reason would be to discount what is clearly a problem that transcends borders and exposes the divisions and strategies utilized by a government bent not on compromises with indigenous people, but the destruction of their way of life. Even if you shrug Roy off as a wacky liberal, the facts point to a disturbing history which does not paint a pretty image for the Indian state. And even if you look at the other side, it's hard to ignore the words spoken by the people in charge, the projects set in place, the militarization of the police, and the general sense that things are not as they should be.
It's perhaps for that reason that I come out of Roy's book feeling unable to challenge the anger and disbelief she channels throughout her book, despite wearing my critical thinking cap during the reading process. Roy doesn't pull many punches when she attacks India's government and the corporations attached to it, but I found myself wondering why she bothered pulling the ones she did. If her facts are in order -- they are -- then what the Indian government is doing doesn't deserve conciliatory gestures, friendly discussion, or calm reasoning. Rather, it seems to me that to fight an extremist state, one must attack it with an extreme position. Roy certainly heads in that direction, and the result is an enormously educational reading experience. When I finished reading, I wondered where we are supposed to go from here. Maybe Roy will cover that in her next book...
Walking with the Comrades is one of the most compelling non-fiction books I have read this year, and certainly one worth remembering for years to come. If you're interested in contemporary Indian history or global capitalism, this is a book to add to your collection.
Read With:
Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
5 Stars
By Gerard Cruz
5 Stars to Walking with the Comrades, by Arundati Roy. Once again, the author bridges a difficult subject concisely and with the proper amount of literary courage and heart. The subject of the indigenous struggle against corporatism and government complicity is a non starter for most news media today, whose editorials are either controlled or owned by corporatist or state. Bravo Arundati!
See all 23 customer reviews...
Walking with the Comrades, by Arundhati Roy PDF
Walking with the Comrades, by Arundhati Roy EPub
Walking with the Comrades, by Arundhati Roy Doc
Walking with the Comrades, by Arundhati Roy iBooks
Walking with the Comrades, by Arundhati Roy rtf
Walking with the Comrades, by Arundhati Roy Mobipocket
Walking with the Comrades, by Arundhati Roy Kindle
Walking with the Comrades, by Arundhati Roy PDF
Walking with the Comrades, by Arundhati Roy PDF
Walking with the Comrades, by Arundhati Roy PDF
Walking with the Comrades, by Arundhati Roy PDF
