Module 1
TEXT
An obsession with growth has eclipsed our concern for sustainability, justice and human dignity. But people are not disposable – the value of life lies outside economic development. Limitless growth is the fantasy of economists, businesses and politicians. It is seen as a measure of progress. As a result, gross domestic product (GDP), which is supposed to measure the wealth of nations, has emerged as both the most powerful number and dominant concept in our times. However, economic growth hides the poverty it creates through the destruction of nature, which in turn leads to communities lacking the capacity to provide for themselves.
The concept of growth was put forward as a measure to mobilise resources during the second world war. GDP is based on creating an artificial and fictitious boundary, assuming that if you produce what you consume, you do not produce. In effect, “growth” measures the conversion of nature into cash, and commons into commodities.
Thus, nature’s amazing cycles of renewal of water and nutrients are defined into nonproduction. The peasants of the world, who provide 72% of the food, do not produce; women who farm or do most of the housework do not fit this paradigm of growth either. A living forest does not contribute to growth, but when trees are cut down and sold as timber, we have growth. Healthy societies and communities do not contribute to growth, but disease creates growth through, for example, the sale of patented medicine.
Water available as a common shared freely and protected by all provides for all. However, it does not create growth. But when Coca-Cola sets up a plant, mines the water and fills plastic bottles with it, the economy grows. But this growth is based on creating poverty – both for nature and local communities. Water extracted beyond nature’s capacity to renew and recharge creates a water famine. Women are forced to walk longer distances looking for drinking water. In the village of Plachimada in Kerala, when the walk for water became 10 kms, local tribal woman Mayilamma said enough is enough. We cannot walk further; the Coca-Cola plant must shut down. The movement that the women started eventually led to the closure of the plant.
In the same vein, evolution has gifted us the seed. Farmers have selected, bred, and diversified it – it is the basis of food production. A seed that renews itself and multiplies produces seeds for the next season, as well as food. However, farmer-bred and farmer-saved seeds are not seen as contributing to growth. It creates and renews life, but it doesn't lead to profits. Growth begins when seeds are modified, patented and genetically locked, leading to farmers being forced to buy more every season.
Nature is impoverished, biodiversity is eroded and a free, open resource is transformed into a patented commodity. Buying seeds every year is a recipe for debt for India’s poor peasants. And ever since seed monopolies have been established, farmers debt has increased. More than 270,000 farmers caught in a debt trap in India have committed suicide since 1995.
Poverty is also further spread when public systems are privatised. The privatisation of water, electricity, health, and education does generate growth through profits. But it also generates poverty by forcing people to spend large amounts of money on what was available at affordable costs as a common good. When every aspect of life is commercialised and commoditised, living becomes more costly, and people become poorer.
Both ecology and economics have emerged from the same roots – "oikos", the Greek word for household. As long as economics was focused on the household, it recognised and respected its basis in natural resources and the limits of ecological renewal. It was focused on providing for basic human needs within these limits. Economics as based on the household was also women-centred. Today, economics is separated from and opposed to both ecological processes and basic needs. While the destruction of nature has been justified on grounds of creating growth, poverty and dispossession has increased. While being non-sustainable, it is also economically unjust.
The dominant model of economic development has in fact become anti-life. When economies are measured only in terms of money flow, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And the rich might be rich in monetary terms – but they too are poor in the wider context of what being human means.
Meanwhile, the demands of the current model of the economy are leading to resource wars oil wars, water wars, food wars. There are three levels of violence involved in non-sustainable development. The first is the violence against the earth, which is expressed as the ecological crisis. The second is the violence against people, which is expressed as poverty, destitution and displacement. The third is the violence of war and conflict, as the powerful reach for the resources that lie in other communities and countries for their limitless appetites.
Increase of money flow through GDP has become disassociated from real value, but those who accumulate financial resources can then stake claim on the real resources of people – their land and water, their forests and seeds. This thirst leads to them predating on the last drop of water and last inch of land on the planet. This is not an end to poverty. It is an end to human rights and justice.
Nobel-prize winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen have admitted that GDP does not capture the human condition and urged the creation of different tools to gauge the wellbeing of nations. This is why countries like Bhutan have adopted the gross national happiness in place of gross domestic product to calculate progress. We need to create measures beyond GDP, and economies beyond the global supermarket, to rejuvenate real wealth. We need to remember that the real currency of life is life itself.
- Vandana Shiva is a guest of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Sydney Opera House.
Introduction to the Author
- Satchidanandan is a well-known writer in Malayalam. He is also a poet of national and international fame. He has represented India at several international literary events. The Government of Italy honored him with Knighthood. The Government of Poland awarded him with India-Poland Friendship Medal. He has been an activist for environment and human rights.
Introduction
Satchidanandan starts with an analysis of Amartya Sen’s viewpoint on globalization. He proceeds to equate globalization with the desire for dominance and hegemony by the west. Satchidanandan exposes globalization with all its falsehoods. He also lists all the characteristics and deeds of Internationalism, which is what Sen is highlighting, as against globalization. Then he focuses on the subject of culture.
Summary
There are, no doubt, many ways of looking at the phenomenon of globalization. Baudrillard called globalization, ‘the greatest form of violence in our times’. Noam Chomksy too has been an informed critic of sinister designs of the US behind the façade of globalization. Amartya Sen however has a slightly different view. He points to the global moral protests against the process of globalization and tries to look at both sides of the argument. He finds merit in some of the issues raised by the protesters while also critiquing some of their arguments.
In the earlier periods of history, globalization meant a movement of knowledge and technology from the east to the west. This has happened in the case of mathematics or metallurgy or the technologies of the production of paper and gunpowder, of printing, magnetic compass, wheel barrow, rotary fan, the crossbow, of building the iron-chain suspension bridge or making kites. Sen suggests fairer distribution of the benefits of globalised economy. He does not agree with the outright rejection of globalization but suggests the institutional modifications that will promote global equity as the solution to these economic ills. There is also the need to open global fronts to fight inequalities of class, race and gender, environmental crises. They should also take up similar issues demanding understanding across nations.
Satchidanandan respected Amartya Sen as a champion of democracy and social justice in our troubled times. Amartya Sen’s ideas suggest the positive aspects of globalization and they are in fact ideas that properly belong to the concept of internationalism. Globalization as practiced today is a recent phenomenon that has emerged from the unipolar situation of the world after the break-down of the Soviet Union and the changes in Eastern Europe. For the champions of globalization, the world is a consumer chain and the accent is always on the market while for the genuine internationalist, the world is a creative space and the accent is on culture. Internationalism believes in the mutual recognition of life-styles, cultural pluralism, and respect for difference and concern for identities. Globalization is all for central control and a command economy. The US promotes fear psychosis and mutual suspicion between nations. This is to create and maintain a war atmosphere. In such a situation they will be able to sell their weapons of war. Globalization is always followed by violence in knowledge and the destruction of social and historical aspects. Globalization is indifferent to environmental pollution. Internationalism is deeply concerned about material and spiritual ecology. If re-colonization is the agenda of globalization, decolonization is central to internationalism.
The question, what is the future of our past, assumes special significance in the present scenario of globalization that is trying to bring back colonial imaginaries through discourses of domination. Languages are another major casualty. Every language is rich with the cultural memories of the people who have been using it. The death of a language is the death of all that it carries. While we are all for English as a creative medium and even a medium of liberation, we need to be critical of its absolute hegemony as a language of power, of the world market and of an aggressive imperialism.
The tendency to look at culture as an industry is only a side branch of the market-view of things that globalization approves and promotes. It has also produced its own forms of entertainment causing people to turn away from genuine art and intellectual writing. The market-oriented globalization looks at culture as an industry. This culture industry debases public taste and ruins long established value system.
The exercise of power in institutions of culture is seldom direct and visible; it is so subtle that it even appears as a kind of freedom. The communication network is an example. Popular fiction, film and television often fill the silences of the people with the articulations of dominant groups. Even book reviews and art write-ups are beginning more and more to resemble advertisements. Success is always identified with affluence and power; the best models are not Gandhi or Medha Patkar, but Ibrahim Dawood and Narendra Modi. The culture of silence and consent promoted by the mass media can be countered only by developing democratic plurality in cultural practice. We need to fight Western Universalism with cultural pluralism and not through blind revivalism and status-quoism. Every cultural battle is the battle of memory against forgetting and needs to retrieve and understand the past critically in order to build a future that recognizes yet is not forced to relive the past.
ONE fine evening, a no less fine government clerk called Ivan Dmitritch Tchervyakov was sitting in the second row of the stalls, gazing through an opera glass at the Cloches de Corneville. He gazed and felt at the acme of bliss. But suddenly. . .. In stories one so often meets with this "But suddenly." The authors are right: life is so full of surprises! But suddenly his face puckered up, his eyes disappeared, his breathing was arrested . . . He took the opera glass from his eyes, bent over and . . . "Aptchee!!" he sneezed as you perceive. It is not reprehensible for anyone to sneeze anywhere. Peasants sneeze and so do police superintendents, and sometimes even privy councilors. All men sneeze. Tchervyakov was not in the least confused, he wiped his face with his handkerchief, and like a polite man, looked round to see whether he had disturbed any one by his sneezing. But then he was overcome with confusion. He saw that an old gentleman sitting in front of him in the first row of the stalls was carefully wiping his bald head and his neck with his glove and muttering something to himself. In the old gentleman, Tchervyakov recognized Brizzhalov, a civilian general serving in the Department of Transport.
"I have spattered him," thought Tchervyakov, "he is not the head of my department, but still it is awkward. I must apologize."
Tchervyakov gave a cough, bent his whole person forward, and whispered in the general's ear.
"Pardon, your Excellency, I spattered you accidentally. . .."
"Never mind, never mind."
"For goodness sake excuse me, I . . . I did not mean to."
"Oh, please, sit down! let me listen!"
Tchervyakov was embarrassed, he smiled stupidly and fell to gazing at the stage. He gazed at it but was no longer feeling bliss. He began to be troubled by uneasiness. In the interval, he went up to Brizzhalov, walked beside him, and overcoming his shyness, muttered:
"I spattered you, your Excellency, forgive me . . . You see . . . I didn't do it to . . .."
"Oh, that's enough . . . I'd forgotten it, and you keep on about it!" said the general, moving his lower lip impatiently.
"He has forgotten, but there is a fiendish light in his eye," thought Tchervyakov, looking suspiciously at the general. "And he doesn't want to talk. I ought to explain to him . . . That I really didn't intend . . . That it is the law of nature or else he will think I meant to spit on him. He doesn't think so now, but he will think so later!"
On getting home, Tchervyakov told his wife of his breach of good manners. It struck him that his wife took too frivolous a view of the incident; she was a little frightened, but when she learned that Brizzhalov was in a different department,
She was reassured.
"Still, you had better go and apologies," she said, "or he will think you don't know how to behave in public."
"That's just it! I did apologies, but he took it somehow queerly . . . He didn't say a word of sense. There wasn't time to talk properly."
Next day Tchervyakov put on a new uniform, had his hair cut and went to Brizzhalov's to explain; going into the general's reception room he saw there a number of petitioners and among them the general himself, who was beginning to interview them. After questioning several petitioners, the general raised his
Eyes and looked at Tchervyakov.
"Yesterday at the Arcadia, if you recollect, your Excellency," the latter began, "I sneezed and . . . Accidentally spattered . . . Exc. . . ."
"What nonsense. . .. It's beyond anything! What can I do for you," said the general addressing the next petitioner.
"He won't speak," thought Tchervyakov, turning pale; "that means that he is angry. . . . No, it can't be left like this. . .. I will explain to him."
When the general had finished his conversation with the last of the petitioners and was turning towards his inner apartments, Tchervyakov took a step towards him and muttered:
"Your Excellency! If I venture to trouble your Excellency, it is simply from a feeling I may say of regret! . . . It was not intentional if you will graciously believe me."
The general made a lachrymose face, and waved his hand.
"Why, you are simply making fun of me, sir," he said as he closed the door behind him.
"Where's the making fun in it?" thought Tchervyakov, "there is nothing of the sort! He is a general, but he can't understand. If that is how it is I am not going to apologies to that fanfaron anymore! The devil take him. I'll write a letter to him, but I won't go. By Jove, I won't."
So thought Tchervyakov as he walked home; he did not write a letter to the general, he pondered and pondered and could not make up that letter. He had to go next day to explain in person.
"I ventured to disturb your Excellency yesterday," he muttered, when the general lifted enquiring eyes upon him, "not to make fun as you were pleased to say. I was apologizing for having spattered you in sneezing. . .. And I did not dream of making fun of you. Should I dare to make fun of you, if we should take to making fun, then there would be no respect for persons, there would be. . .."
"Be off!" yelled the general, turning suddenly purple, and shaking all over.
"What?" asked Tchervyakov, in a whisper turning numb with horror.
"Be off!" repeated the general, stamping.
Something seemed to give way in Tchervyakov's stomach. Seeing nothing and hearing nothing he reeled to the door, went out into the street, and went staggering along. . .. Reaching home mechanically, without taking off his uniform, he lay down on the sofa and died.
WHAT is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare? —
No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:
No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
- W.H. Davis
What is god
and what is stone
the dividing line
if it exists
is very thin
at jejuri
and every other stone
is god or his cousin
there is no crop
other than god
and god is harvested here
around the year
and round the clock
out of the bad earth
and the hard rock
that giant hunk of rock
the size of a bedroom
is khandoba's wife turned to stone
the crack that runs right across
is the scar from his broadsword
he struck her down with
once in a fit of rage
scratch a rock
and a legend springs
- Arun Kolatkar
Today the world is a little more my own.
No need to remember the pain
A blue-frocked woman caused, throwing
Words at me like pots and pans, to drain
That honey-coloured day of peace,
“Why don’t you join the others, what
A peculiar child you are!"
On the lawn, in clusters, sat my schoolmates sipping
Sugarcane, they turned and laughed;
Children are funny things, they laugh
In mirth at other’s tears, I buried
My face in the sun-warmed hedge
And smelt the flowers and the pain.
The words are muffled now, the laughing
Faces only a blur. The years have
Sped along, stopping briefly
At beloved halts and moving
Sadly on. My mind has found
An adult peace. No need to remember
That picnic day when I lay hidden
By a hedge, watching the steel-white sun
Standing lonely in the sky.
- Kamala Das
My father told the tenants to leave
Who lived on the houses surrounding our house on the hill
One by one the structures were demolished
Only our own house remained and the trees
Trees are sacred my grandmother used to say
Felling them is a crime but he massacred them all
The sheoga, the oudumber, the neem was all cut down
But the huge banyan tree stood like a problem
Whose roots lay deeper than all our lives
My father ordered it to be removed
The banyan tree was three times as tall as our house
Its trunk had a circumference of fifty feet
Its scraggy aerial roots fell to the ground
From thirty feet or more so first they cut the branches
Sawing them off for seven days and the heap was huge
Insects and birds began to leave the tree
And then they came to its massive trunk
Fifty men with axes chopped and chopped
The great tree revealed its rings of two hundred years
We watched in terror and fascination this slaughter
As a raw mythology revealed to us its age
Soon afterwards we left Baroda for Bombay
Where there are no trees except the one
Which grows and seethes in one's dreams, its aerial roots
Looking for the ground to strike.
- Dilip Chitre
It takes much time to kill a tree,
Not a simple jab of the knife
Will do it. It has grown
Slowly consuming the earth,
Rising out of it, feeding
Upon its crust, absorbing
Years of sunlight, air, water,
And out of its leprous hide
Sprouting leaves.
So hack and chop
But this alone won't do it.
Not so much pain will do it.
The bleeding bark will heal
And from close to the ground
Will rise curled green twigs,
Miniature boughs
Which if unchecked will expand again
To former size.
No,
The root is to be pulled out —
Out of the anchoring earth;
It is to be roped, tied,
And pulled out — snapped out
Or pulled out entirely,
Out from the earth-cave,
And the strength of the tree exposed
The source, white and wet,
The most sensitive, hidden
For years inside the earth.
Then the matter
Of scorching and choking
In sun and air,
Browning, hardening,
Twisting, withering,
And then it is done.
- Gieve Patel
