The Algebra Of Infinite Justice

In her Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy turned a compassionate but unrelenting eye on one family's world in India. Now she lavishes the same fierce humanity on the future of her beloved country - and the world itself. In the essays of this spirited polemic, she takes on the great illusions of India's progress : the massive dam projects that were supposed to haul this sprawling subcontinent into the modern age - but which instead have displaced untold millions - and the detonation of India's first nuclear bomb. She also explores the politics of writing, the systematic incitement of religious hatred, and the cost of "development" driven by profit - challenging the idea that only "experts" can speak out on such urgent matters as nuclear threats, the human toll of the privatization of India's power supply by US companies like Enron, the rise of bloody, extremist Hindu nationalism and the construction of monumental dams. For those who have been mesmerized by Roy's vision of India, here are sketches, traced in fire, of its topsy-turvy society, where the lives of the many are sacrified for the comforts of the few.