> Dr. E. Ann Clark
Ann, I've always enjoyed your thoughtful and reasoned responses
to this group. Your observation here reminded me of a brief
passage in V.S. Naipaul's book "India: A Million Mutinies Now"
that I read several years ago but which remains in my mind.
Debu, a middle-class Indian reminisces about his participation in
the Marxist movement in West Bengal and his eventual ideological
fallout with the party leadership. His decision to join a radical
communist party comes at a time when India is in the midst of a
food crisis. There were food riots and people were being shot by
the police. People, says Debu, were eating "milo", a coarse type
of sorghum:
"...which the Americans fed their pigs, and which they had sent
over as charity, and the Government of India...used to feed the
village poor. I was very ashamed and angry. To me it wasn't the
poor who were eating it. It was Indians and Bengalis."
I do not mean this to take on the tone of a B-grade Greenpeace
bulletin, but statistics on the inequities of land use and resource
consumption suddenly become staggeringly real when the one with the
begging bowl has a real human face, one that looks startlingly like
yours.
-- Radhika B. rbala@ncatfyv.uark.edu