Uniquely placed Nandan Nilekani, ‘CEO’ of Project UID. (Photograph by Jitender Gupta)

by Arundhati Roy

Re-posted from Outlook India

Rockefeller to Mandela, Vedanta to Anna Hazare…. How long can the cardinals of corporate gospel buy up our protests?

Is it a house or a home? A temple to the new India, or a warehouse for its ghosts? Ever since Antilla arrived on Altamont Road in Mumbai, exuding mystery and quiet menace, things have not been the same. “Here we are,” the friend who took me there said, “Pay your respects to our new Ruler.”

Antilla belongs to India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. I had read about this most expensive dwelling ever built, the twenty-seven floors, three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, ballrooms, weather rooms, gymnasiums, six floors of parking, and the six hundred servants. Nothing had prepared me for the vertical lawn—a soaring, 27-storey-high wall of grass attached to a vast metal grid. The grass was dry in patches; bits had fallen off in neat rectangles. Clearly, Trickledown hadn’t worked.

But Gush-Up certainly has. That’s why in a nation of 1.2 billion, India’s 100 richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of the GDP.

The word on the street (and in the New York Times) is, or at least was, that after all that effort and gardening, the Ambanis don’t live in Antilla. No one knows for sure. People still whisper about ghosts and bad luck, Vaastu and Feng Shui. Maybe it’s all Karl Marx’s fault. (All that cussing.) Capitalism, he said, “has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, that it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”.

In India, the 300 million of us who belong to the new, post-IMF “reforms” middle class—the market—live side by side with spirits of the nether world, the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains and denuded forests; the ghosts of 2,50,000 debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves, and of the 800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us. And who survive on less than twenty rupees a day.

Mukesh Ambani is personally worth $20 billion. He holds a majority controlling share in Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a company with a market capitalisation of $47 billion and global business interests that include petrochemicals, oil, natural gas, polyester fibre, Special Economic Zones, fresh food retail, high schools, life sciences research and stem cell storage services. RIL recently bought 95 per cent shares in Infotel, a TV consortium that controls 27 TV news and entertainment channels, including CNN-IBN, IBN Live, CNBC, IBN Lokmat, and ETV in almost every regional language. Infotel owns the only nationwide licence for 4G Broadband, a high-speed “information pipeline” which, if the technology works, could be the future of information exchange. Mr Ambani also owns a cricket team.

RIL is one of a handful of corporations that run India. Some of the others are the Tatas, Jindals, Vedanta, Mittals, Infosys, Essar and the other Reliance (ADAG), owned by Mukesh’s brother Anil. Their race for growth has spilled across Europe, Central Asia, Africa and Latin America. Their nets are cast wide; they are visible and invisible, over-ground as well as underground. The Tatas, for example, run more than 100 companies in 80 countries. They are one of India’s oldest and largest private sector power companies. They own mines, gas fields, steel plants, telephone, cable TV and broadband networks, and run whole townships. They manufacture cars and trucks, own the Taj Hotel chain, Jaguar, Land Rover, Daewoo, Tetley Tea, a publishing company, a chain of bookstores, a major brand of iodised salt and the cosmetics giant Lakme. Their advertising tagline could easily be: You Can’t Live Without Us.

According to the rules of the Gush-Up Gospel, the more you have, the more you can have.

The era of the Privatisation of Everything has made the Indian economy one of the fastest growing in the world. However, like any good old-fashioned colony, one of its main exports is its minerals. India’s new mega-corporations—Tatas, Jindals, Essar, Reliance, Sterlite—are those who have managed to muscle their way to the head of the spigot that is spewing money extracted from deep inside the earth. It’s a dream come true for businessmen—to be able to sell what they don’t have to buy.

Read more here

OCCUPY THE SCREEN!

ROXIE THEATER
March 29, 2012, 7pm
3117 16th Street
San Francisco, CA

Co-Organized by: Christopher Statton, Roxie Theater; Julie Gilgoff & Alex Tonisson, IFPTE Local 21; Megan Wilson, CAPITALISM IS OVER! If You Want It

Thursday, March 29th The Roxie Theater will host a film series and panel discussion  to help bring historic context to social and economic protest movements, beginning with the Civil Rights’ Movement, and extending to other movements that have reclaimed public spaces to protest injustice. The film night will serve as a continuation of the discussion brought to the forefront by the Occupy Movement. Now that the encampments have been dispersed, what are communities around the Bay Area doing to challenge social and economic inequities?

A segment of Newreel’s documentary series of the Black Panther Party, What We Want, What We Belive will be featured with several short films, including AFT 2121: The Movie, Art Strikes Back, Yes Men’s Guide to High Level Pranking, and Occupy SF – Veterans Day: Amos Gregory. The screening will be followed with a panel discussion. Panelists include:
Kiilu Nyasha, San Francisco-based journalist and former member of the Black Panther Party.
Amos Gregory, Veteran Artist (US Navy, Submarine Force), Founder, Veterans’ Alley, San Francisco.
Reverend Paul Gaffney, Marin Interfaith Street Chaplaincy
Ramneek Saini, Community Services Director for the San Francisco Labor Council

The People’s Federal Credit Union (based out of Oakland) will also have a table set up to provide information on how to transfer your money from a big bank to a credit union.

The event will be FREE to the public with a suggested donation. 7pm

On What We Want, What We Believe:
“The invaluable Movement documentaries Newsreel produced furthered the work of the Black Panther Party and now provide the esdentail visual record of the Party’s early days. The collection offers an extraordinary compilation that includes historic behind the scenes details taken from a wide range of interviews and contemporary events as well as the classic Newsreel films.”
—Kathleen Cleaver, Communications Secretary, Black Panther Party, 1967–1971

The main theme of Hubbard’s model of material narrative is a neocapitalist whole. Bataille’s analysis of dialectic Marxism suggests that language may be used to reinforce colonialist perceptions of class. In a sense, Derrida uses the term ‘Debordist situation’ to denote the role of the observer as writer.

Material narrative states that narrativity is capable of significance, given that Baudrillard’s critique of dialectic Marxism is invalid. However, Bataille promotes the use of material narrative to attack truth…………………..

The post you have been reading is totally meaningless. To read the rest of this essay, follow this link. The essay was generated automatically by the Postmodernism Generator using the Dada Engine. To generate a new essay, follow this link. It makes me laugh out loud and reminds me of reading The Archeology of Knowledge by Foucault.