21.12.10

On the conflict raised by the Sardar Sarovar megadam built on the Narmada river in central India, for those of you interested in the politics of infrastructure.

"On the one hand, it is seen as a war between modern, rational, progressive forces of ´Development´v. a sort of neo-Luddite impulse -an irrational, emotional ´Anti-development´resistance, fueled by an arcadian, pre-industrial dream. / On the other, as a Nehru v. Gandhi contest [...] The Nehru v. Gandhi argument pushes this very contemporary issue back into an old bottle. Nehru and Gandhi were generous men. Their paradigms for development are based on assumptions of inherent morality. Nehru´s on the paternal, protective morality of the Soviet-style centralized State Gandhi´s on the nurturing, maternal morality of romanticized village republics [...] It's possible that as a nation we've exhausted our quota of heroes for this century, but while we wait for shiny new ones to come along, we have to limit the damage. We have to support our small heroes. (Of these we have many. Many.) We have to fight specific wars in specific ways. Who knows, perhaps that's what the twenty-first century has in store for us. The dismantling of the Big. Big bombs, big dams, big ideologies, big contradictions, big countries, big wars, big heroes, big mistakes. Perhaps it will be the Century of the Small." In the Cost of Living, by Arundhati Roy