What, then, is the solution? 'I’m not an economist,' she says, 'so I can’t really give you an alternative that works.' Nevertheless, Roy is clear that the best option is local power. This, she believes, has to be the future for India––decentralized economics, de-centralized control; handing some measure of power back to the people. 'Unless that happens,' she says, 'however far into the information age 3 percent of the population goes, they’re always going to be pulled back by what they’re doing to everybody else.'

Arundhati Roy is convinced that Indians, allowed to choose for themselves, will fashion a society informed by the ways Indians have always lived, attuned to everyday existence, community life, and the patterns of nature. The alternative is there for all to see, in the increasingly atomized, mechanized, and disconnected West.

'When you go to Europe or America for the first time,' she says, 'you arrive in a city where you don’t see any mud, and everything looks really nice, all the cars and the steel and the glass. But I look at a car and I think, ‘Somehow this came from earth and water and forest.’ How? I don’t know. But you need to know––you need to know what the connection is; who paid the price of what. If you at least know that, there’ll be some balance.' She smiles slightly, as if the point was almost too obvious to be worth making. 'There has to be some balance.'
From The Ecologist (Sept. 2000). Subscriptions: $35/yr. (6 issues) from Cissburg House, Furze View, Five Oaks Rd., Slinfold, West Sussex RH13 7RH UK. Photographs by Karen Robinson/PANOS