I came across this video of Arundhati Roy and Naomi Klein on The Nation yesterday.  I'm not usually pleased when lecturers deliver their presentations by reading from a prepared script.  However, Roy is such a marvelous writer that having her read her own written words produces a great experience for the listener.

Americans don't pay a lot of attention to what is going on in India,  but we make that choice at our own peril.  It is a country of over a billion people ruled by an authoritarian regime which operates comfortably in the neo-liberal global economy.  One result of that is that India is far along the path to the environmental disaster brought to us by a combination of global warming and continuing bad economic and political choices.  It is a scenario that is very likely a preview of what is coming to the U.S. and the other most prosperous nations which tend to think of themselves as much more advanced than those of the sub-continent.

Roy does a marvelous job of explaining all that in this video as well as in her recent books including The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, a novel which focuses on the plight of Kashmir whose people are living through a nightmare of military control over of every aspect of their lives.

The written version of Roy's story about India is available in an article at The Nation.