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The Cost of Living Paperback – Oct. 26 1999

by Arundhati Roy (Author)

4.3 30 ratings

From the bestselling author of The God of Small Things comes a scathing and passionate indictment of big government's
disregard for the individual.

In her Booker Prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy turned a compassionate but unrelenting eye on one family in India. Now she lavishes the same acrobatic language and fierce humanity on the future of her beloved country. In this spirited polemic, Roy dares to take on two of the great illusions of India's progress: the massive dam projects that were supposed to haul this sprawling subcontinent into the modern age--but which instead have displaced untold millions--and the detonation of India's first nuclear bomb, with all its attendant Faustian bargains.

Merging her inimitable voice with a great moral outrage and imaginative sweep, Roy peels away the mask of democracy and prosperity to show the true costs hidden beneath. For those who have been mesmerized by her vision of India, here is a sketch, traced in fire, of its topsy-turvy society, where the lives of the many are sacrificed for the comforts of the few.

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Print length

144 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage Canada
Publication date

Oct. 26 1999
Dimensions

13.94 x 0.91 x 21.46 cm
ISBN-10

0679310371
ISBN-13

978-0679310372
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885
Paperback
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Review

Praise for The God of Small Things:

"Treading Roy's maze, we learn a great deal about a 'vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation.' . . . The God of Small Things delivers so much terror and beauty, and so omniscient a view of India. . . . Like a devotionally built temple, it builds a massive interlocking structure of fine, intensely felt details." -- John Updike, The New Yorker

From the Back Cover

Praise for The God of Small Things:

"Treading Roy's maze, we learn a great deal about a 'vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation.' . . . The God of Small Things delivers so much terror and beauty, and so omniscient a view of India. . . . Like a devotionally built temple, it builds a massive interlocking structure of fine, intensely felt details." -- John Updike, The New Yorker

About the Author

Arundhati Roy was trained as an architect. Her first novel, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize, spent forty-nine weeks on the New York Times bestseller lists, and has been published in thirty-three languages. She lives in New Delhi.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

May 1998. It'll go down in history books, provided of course we have history books to go down in. Provided, of course, we have a future. There's nothing new or original left to be said about nuclear weapons. There can be nothing more humiliating for a writer of fiction to have to do than restate a case that has, over the years, already been made by other people in other parts of the world, and made passionately, eloquently, and knowledgeably.

I am prepared to grovel. To humiliate myself abjectly, because, in the circumstances, silence would be indefensible. So those of you who are willing: let's pick our parts, put on these discarded costumes, and speak our secondhand lines in this sad secondhand play. But let's not forget that the stakes we're playing for are huge. Our fatigue and our shame could mean the end of us. The end of our children and our children's children. Of everything we love. We have to reach within ourselves and find the strength to think. To fight.

Once again we are pitifully behind the times--not just scientifically and technologically (ignore the hollow claims), but more pertinently in our ability to grasp the true nature of nuclear weapons. Our Comprehension of the Horror Department is hopelessly obsolete. Here we are, all of us in India and in Pakistan, discussing the finer points of politics, and foreign policy, behaving for all the world as though our governments have just devised a newer, bigger bomb, a sort of immense hand grenade with which they will annihilate the enemy (each other) and protect us from all harm. How desperately we want to believe that. What wonderful, willing, well-behaved, gullible subjects we have turned out to be. The rest of humanity (yes, yes, I know, I know, but let's ignore them for the moment. They forfeited their votes a long time ago), the rest of the rest of humanity may not forgive us, but then the rest of the rest of humanity, depending on who fashions its views, may not know what a tired, dejected heartbroken people we are. Perhaps it doesn't realize how urgently we need a miracle. How deeply we yearn for magic.

If only, if only, nuclear war was just another kind of war. If only it was about the usual things--nations and territories, gods and histories. If only those of us who dread it are just worthless moral cowards who are not prepared to die in defense of our beliefs. If only nuclear war was the kind of war in which countries battle countries and men battle men. But it isn't. If there is a nuclear war, our foes will not be China or America or even each other. Our foe will be the earth herself. The very elements--the sky, the air, the land, the wind and water -- will all turn against us. Their wrath will be terrible.

Our cities and forests, our fields and villages will burn for days. Rivers will turn to poison. The air will become fire. The wind will spread the flames. When everything there is to burn has burned and the fires die, smoke will rise and shut out the sun. The earth will be enveloped in darkness. There will be no day. Only interminable night. Temperatures will drop to far below freezing and nuclear winter will set in. Water will turn into toxic ice. Radioactive fallout will seep through the earth and contaminate groundwater. Most living things, animal and vegetable, fish and fowl, will die. Only rats and cockroaches will breed and multiply and compete with foraging, relict humans for what little food there is.

What shall we do then, those of us who are still alive? Burned and blind and bald and ill, carrying the cancerous carcasses of our children in our arms, where shall we go? What shall we eat? What shall we drink? What shall we breathe?

The head of the Health, Environment and Safety Group of the Bhabha Atomic Research Center in Bombay has a plan. He declared in an interview (The Pioneer, 24 April 1998) that India could survive nuclear war. His advice is that if there is a nuclear war, we take the same safety measures as the ones that scientists have recommended in the event of accidents at nuclear plants.

Take iodine pills, he suggests. And other steps such as remaining indoors, consuming only stored water and food and avoiding milk. Infants should be given powdered milk. "People in the danger zone should immediately go to the ground floor and if possible to the basement."

What do you do with these levels of lunacy? What do you do if you're trapped in an asylum and the doctors are all dangerously deranged?

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage Canada; First Edition 1st Printing (Oct. 26 1999)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 144 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0679310371
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0679310372
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 205 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.94 x 0.91 x 21.46 cm

Best Sellers Rank: #1,856,511 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,059 in Politics in Government
- #53,291 in Politics (Books)
- #145,376 in Social Sciences (Books)

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4.3 30 ratings

About the author

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Arundhati Roy

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Arundhati Roy is the author of a number of books, including The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997 and has been translated into more than forty languages. She was born in 1959 in Shillong, India, and studied architecture in Delhi, where she now lives. She has also written several non-fiction books, including Field Notes on Democracy, Walking with the Comrades, Capitalism: A Ghost Story, The End of Imagination, and most recently Things That Can and Cannot Be Said, co-authored with John Cusack. Roy is the recipient of the 2002 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize, the 2011 Norman Mailer Prize for Distinguished Writing, and the 2015 Ambedkar Sudar award.

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Ayman S. Ashour

Brave & Universal - not just for Indians!

Reviewed in Canada on August 16, 2001

Arundhati Roy has a wonderful way of writing. This woman could write about absolutely anything at all and I think I will still enjoy it. She has a naturally earnest free flowing poetic yet precise language. She has the ability to choose her words so well as to get the exact picture or impression she wants us to see. Truly she paints with her words.
Roy used her amazing writing skills and sensitivity so very well in her fantastic work, The God of Small Things. Here she uses the same skills and more aiming primarily at her own people asking them to re-examine 2 strongly held views. As non-Indian I thoroughly enjoyed both essays of this book.
The first essay deals with the construction of river dams in India since the independence in 1947. Roy set about in a very systematic way to establish the true cost of the dams in terms of human suffering. She focused on one project in particular but her research was wide ranging and indeed she had to dig into several completed projects to establish true benefits and costs. Roy's central message is that the price paid by an oppressed native minority is way too high and the alleged benefits to India are low. Where this essay is truly universal, at least applicable to so many third world countries in the post colonial era, is in its research for a definition for her own country, identity and common good and modes of opposition to this common good! Roy was also highly unimpressed with the western approach to 3rd world development projects but her approach was a times too general and sweeping.
The Second article, probably far more universal, is the nuclear weapons article. Roy's analysis of the policies of the Congress party and the BJP nationalists leading to the 1998 explosions shows great insight and clarity of mind. She categorically opposes the bomb as weapon of peace and she totally rejects the overwhelming support of her people for the bomb and the Indian nuclear tests. Having traveled to India shortly after the Indian and Pakistani explosions I was horrified with the attitude of "our bomb was better than theirs" and this is the first work that I personally have seen that takes on this subject with such force. Roy's opposition leaves no prisoners behind. It is hard to overstate the courage of Roy on this issue given the level of tension between Hindu India and Islam within India itself and across the borders.
I strongly recommend this wonderfully written book to anyone interested in issues related to regional conflicts and postcolonial development.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Cwp

Aware; insightful

Reviewed in Canada on June 17, 2003

Contrary to her critics, I do not believe this woman can be neatly dismissed as a 'Marxist'. In many places she describes how these kind of huge, overblown, poorly considered projects are the natural result of India's huge, titularly 'socialist' bureaucracy. Like me, and unlike Noam Chomsky or others, she does not traffic in conspiracy theories. That is, she does not insist that a hidden, evil intelligence is in charge of the events she describes. Rather, she is aware of the DISorganization that naturally occurs whenever human beings get together in large groups--like militaries or bureaucracies, leftist or rightist, with good intentions or ill.
It would also be a mistake for anyone to think this book pertains only to India. As an American, I can see many of the same sorts of elements she describes: a failure to understand the links between ecology and economy; false economies (that is, technology that awes in its scale yet fundamentally degrades rather than improves human life); misplaced government priorities; rule by the courts, etc.

Helpful

Carra R Lane

Bombs Explode; A Reservoir Begins to Fill

Reviewed in Canada on November 6, 2001

The title reprises the astonishingly closing chapter of THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS, perfectly appropriately. At its spooky best, writing risks offering readers something very close to the heart's cry of a bright fellow human. This writing is very very close. Sufficiently exasperated, too.
Ms. Roy is Indian, or some kind of vigorous hybrid, as if Mohandas K. Ghandi & Molly Ivins & James Joyce & Mary Wollstonecraft had somehow mixed up together, which is amusing to consider at the conceptual stage plus makes for plumb interesting salty reading. Arundhati Molly Saint Mary Magdelene Bloom Mahatma Roy? As Joyce himself may have claimed (if online resources are to be trusted), perhaps grimacing very much like Mona Lisa, "Molly Bloom was a down-to-earth lady. She would never have indulged in anything so refined as a stream of consciousness." Whether or not Joyce was strictly fair, Roy shares, with Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley & a few others, a concern about the usual effects of mankind's most Promethean notions. What hath we wrought now, again? Terrifying!
A natural wide ranging curiosity lightly mitigated by rather sketchy professional architect training leads where it leads? Roy can perform research, calculate costs so accurately that narrow experts may scream. Her Indian heritage might suggest this/that to USA gentle readers who have perused any good translations of the straight responses offered by some American Indians (Pachgrantschilias, Red Jacket, Pontiac, Osceola, Tecumseh, Black Hawk, Sitting Bull, Joseph, Black Elk, many others) as dutiful civilized soldiers exterminated/dislocated balky natives who hesitated to clear the way for a ruthless expansion we called Manifest Destiny, then (we might rename this progress continentalization, now?). Arundhati Roy walks/writes/lives in beauty. The English language rarely gets a writer like her, perhaps since English-speaking cultures hardly ever, maybe practically never, want one.

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Ayman S. Ashour

Brave & Universal - not just for Indians!

Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2001

Verified Purchase

Arundhati Roy has a wonderful way of writing. This woman could write about absolutely anything at all and I think I will still enjoy it. She has a naturally earnest free flowing poetic yet precise language. She has the ability to choose her words so well as to get the exact picture or impression she wants us to see. Truly she paints with her words.
Roy used her amazing writing skills and sensitivity so very well in her fantastic work, The God of Small Things. Here she uses the same skills and more aiming primarily at her own people asking them to re-examine 2 strongly held views. As non-Indian I thoroughly enjoyed both essays of this book.
The first essay deals with the construction of river dams in India since the independence in 1947. Roy set about in a very systematic way to establish the true cost of the dams in terms of human suffering. She focused on one project in particular but her research was wide ranging and indeed she had to dig into several completed projects to establish true benefits and costs. Roy's central message is that the price paid by an oppressed native minority is way too high and the alleged benefits to India are low. Where this essay is truly universal, at least applicable to so many third world countries in the post colonial era, is in its research for a definition for her own country, identity and common good and modes of opposition to this common good! Roy was also highly unimpressed with the western approach to 3rd world development projects but her approach was a times too general and sweeping.
The Second article, probably far more universal, is the nuclear weapons article. Roy's analysis of the policies of the Congress party and the BJP nationalists leading to the 1998 explosions shows great insight and clarity of mind. She categorically opposes the bomb as weapon of peace and she totally rejects the overwhelming support of her people for the bomb and the Indian nuclear tests. Having traveled to India shortly after the Indian and Pakistani explosions I was horrified with the attitude of "our bomb was better than theirs" and this is the first work that I personally have seen that takes on this subject with such force. Roy's opposition leaves no prisoners behind. It is hard to overstate the courage of Roy on this issue given the level of tension between Hindu India and Islam within India itself and across the borders.
I strongly recommend this wonderfully written book to anyone interested in issues related to regional conflicts and postcolonial development.

14 people found this helpful

Poison Wood

roy strikes again

Reviewed in the United States on July 10, 2007

Verified Purchase

Arundhati Roy is more or less guaranteed to hit below the belt. For an American reader, she is also guaranteed to teach you something you probably knew little about. She invariably does so in a marvelous fashion; her prose is unmatched. If you enjoyed her work of fiction, The God of Small Things, I encourage you to try her non-fiction works.

This book focuses on the dams on India; it's a passionate argument against damming and in favor of considering people, all the poor people of India.

Roy also discusses India's testing of the atomic bomb, another topic which most Americans probably haven't spent a great deal of time considering. Roy is convincing and writes from the heart in a way very few politicians or politicists do.

MMM

Cost of Living

Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2012

Verified Purchase

Another wonderful book by this author. Strongly recommend you read this . A must read for anyone interested in the future of India and Pakistan . I learned so much from this book .It probably should be used as a text book at the high school or even college level for teaching an international government class . Never have I learned so much about waste in government spending and the negative affects of dams . Apparently we haven't learned anything because China and others continue to make the same mistakes .

2 people found this helpful

Airi

Good quality

Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2012

Verified Purchase

I believe I ordered mine as a used but it's great quality and doesn't have any marks inside, which I appreciate.

Abhilash Nambiar

This book adds to your cost of living

Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2012

Verified Purchase

For $11.99 it is an expensive ebook for $4.99 it would have been affordable. I am saying this as someone who read it and feel not have got the money's worth. There is little in it that cannot be ascertained from reading her other Book 'Walking with the Comrades'. That book is well written and more fact rich all be it the facts in her book are not likely to be independently verified. I wonder why she sticks to narratives which are full of Rhetoric and facts that are difficult to verify. But I suppose facts that cannot be independently verified is better than having no facts at all. In any case this book is not rich on facts about the events that are written about. And besides not everyone is interested in facts.

One person found this helpful

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Follow the author

The Cost of Living Paperback – Oct. 26 1999

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Product description

Review

From the Back Cover

About the Author

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Product details

About the author

Arundhati Roy

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