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Listening to Grasshoppers

Listening to Grasshoppers 1

Field Notes on Democracy

by Arundhati Roy
Paperback
Publication Date: 03/06/2010
4/5 Rating 1 Review

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'What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning?'

Combining brilliant insight and razor-sharp prose, Listening to Grasshoppers is Arundhati Roy's essential exploration of the political picture in India today. In these essays she takes a hard look at the underbelly of the world's largest democracy and shows how the journey that Hindu nationalism and neo-liberal economic reforms began together in the early 1990s is unravelling in dangerous ways.
Beginning with the state-backed killing of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, and ending with an analysis of the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai, Listening to Grasshoppers tracks the fault-lines that threaten to destroy India's precarious future and, along the way, asks fundamental questions about democracy itself - a political system that has, by virtue of being considered 'the best available option', been put beyond doubt and correction.
ISBN:
9780141044095
9780141044095
Category:
Political structures: democracy
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
03-06-2010
Language:
English
Publisher:
Penguin Books Ltd
Country of origin:
United Kingdom
Pages:
304
Dimensions (mm):
198x129x18mm
Weight:
0.21kg
Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy is the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things.

Her political writings include The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Listening to Grasshoppers, Broken Republic and Capitalism- A Ghost Story, and most recently Things That Can and Cannot Be Said, co-authored with John Cusack.

Arundhati Roy lives in New Delhi and her new novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness will be published by Hamish Hamilton in June 2017.

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Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy is the 12th non-fiction book by Booker Prize winning author, Arundhati Roy. In this collection of eleven related essays, the author of The God Of Small Things turns her prodigious talent for striking imagery and eloquent prose to the exploration of the political situation in India. Roy states that the essays were written in anger, in reaction to certain events (massacres, pogroms, genocide, assassinations, death sentences) and have been reprinted unchanged (although endnotes may have been added). While the significance of many names will be missed by those readers unfamiliar with current affairs in India (this reader included), nonetheless, Roy gets her point across. Although the corruption she writes about is no surprise, her revelations of the judiciary system, genocide, the Kashmir situation and religious tensions may be an eye opener. The conclusion I make from this powerful read is that I am eternally grateful not to be living as a non-Hindu in present-day India. As well as copious endnotes and references, Roy includes a short story, The Briefing, in the Appendix. I wonder, do fans of this amazing authors novel hope in vain for another foray by her into the world of fiction?

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