Tremendous research demonstrates how “indignity is a form of generalized social violence” corroding democracy.
A sharp critical study of the steady decline of democracy in India.
In a hard-hitting, relentless chronicle of social and political ills, Chowdhury, a Hong Kong–based journalist, and Keane, a professor of politics at the University of Sydney, trace the decomposition of Indian democracy since the hopeful time of independence in August 1947—a process that has accelerated in recent years under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The great experiment of Indian democracy, forged from staggering diversity and the “polychromatic reality” of Indian society, is now in critical danger. “Weighed down by destitution of heart-breaking proportions,” write the authors, the world’s largest democracy suffers glaring “emergencies” in the societal structure (clean air and water, education, health care, etc.) that have been ignored or underestimated during decades of feeble leadership, leaving tens of millions of impoverished Indians without essential constitutional rights. In an impassioned narrative, the authors move from the first parliamentary general election—“which began in October 1951 and took six months to conduct. It was the grandest show the world had ever seen”—to the most recent, when Modi, with his Hindu-dominant Bharatiya Janata Party, used his money and power to intimidate voters and quell dissent. The authors delineate the heartbreaking collapse of the social fabric and how the pandemic has exposed the abysmal health care system. Most Indians endure “indignities” unheard of in the West, such as rampant pollution, food insecurity, malnutrition, lack of health care and education, especially for girls and women, and even slave labor. While some elections have been effective, especially because the poor have been participating in greater numbers, the recent Modi years demonstrate how money and intimidation dominate the landscape, essentially neutralizing the other arms of government. The authors warn of Modi’s creeping despotism. For example, “in August 2019, with the stroke of a pen, Modi’s government revoked the autonomous status of the restive state of Jammu and Kashmir.” This book sounds an urgent alarm.
Tremendous research demonstrates how “indignity is a form of generalized social violence” corroding democracy.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-19-884860-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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