The Cost of Living (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: big dams, Arundhati Roy, The Greater Common Good, Sardar Sarovar (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things dons a pundit's hat in her second book, and it's an awkward fit. This slim volume offers two previously published magazine articles. "The Greater Common Good," which appeared in Outlook, an Indian magazine, argues against the building of a controversial dam on the Narmada River in India. Roy notes that 60% of the 200,000 people likely to be uprooted by the project are tribal people, many illiterate, who will be deprived of their original livelihoods and land. Drawing on studies and government and court documents, Roy criticizes the World Bank, the Indian government and a political system that favors interest groups at the expense of the poor. In the second essay, "The End of Imagination," a criticism of India's decision to test a nuclear bomb that was published in the Nation in September 1998, Roy asks why India built the bomb when more than 400 million Indians are illiterate and live in absolute poverty. It's a good question, but fully a fifth of the article is devoted to a friend telling Roy that she has become so famous that the rest of her life would be "vaguely unsatisfying"Awhich is a fair description of this book. Roy surely has meaningful things to say about India. But she is not yet nearly as accomplished a political critic as she is a novelist. This effort, marred by general attacks on "the system" and personal digressions that distract a reader from the substantive issues at hand, is cursory and na?ve. That Roy anticipates this criticism doesn't render it any less valid. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The phenomenal success of Roy's Booker Prize winning first novel The God of Small Things (LJ 4/15/97) has metamorphosed her into an activist supporting unpopular causes. This book consists of two parts: "The Greater Common Good" attacks the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada river in western India, while "The End of Imagination" denounces India's nuclear tests in May 1998. The Save the Narmada movement, a grass-roots, anti-dam movement that has been agitating for over a decade, believes that instead of being a solution to India's water and power shortages, the still-incomplete dam will cause immense distress owing to the displacement of 40 million people, the submergence of 245 villages, inequities in resettlement, and environmental disasters. Roy's polemical tract on their behalf, while not a dispassionate inquiry, raises some important questions about the real price of "development," whether in the form of big dams or bombs. For public and academic libraries.ARavi Shenoy, Hinsdale P.L., IL
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Modern Library (October 12, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375756140
• ISBN-13: 978-0375756146
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #237,630 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Masters of the Universe?, January 23, 2001

By	George N. Wells (Dover, NJ USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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Ms. Roy captures the essence of the technological problems of the planet today. We humans like to think of ourselves as "Masters of the Universe." When, in fact, we are flawed creatures who do things without the wisdom to see the long-term consequences of our actions - be they building a dam or nuclear weapon.

It is not lost on this reader, that the "father" of the atomic bomb quoted the lines of Shiva when he first saw his weapon exploded - "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." We humans are good at destruction; sometimes it even looks like building.

While Ms. Roy's prose is a bit less poetic than that found in "The God of Small Things," her passion makes up for the linguistic power. She is calling out the leaders, not only of India, but also of the world, to reconsider the consequences of what they are doing to the earth and its peoples. All of these actions, of course, in the names of progress and national defense.

It is not likely that Ms. Roy's writings will change the governments. But perhaps they will open your eyes as they did mine, to the realities of what we are doing on and to this planet. At the beginning of the 21st century we are again looking at the exploitation of the earth that nurtures us to the point where it may no longer support us.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must Read for privileged Indian-Americans!, January 28, 2000

By	SKC "skchheda" (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) - See all my reviews

Not a book that would wow the reader with eloquence, but a passionate and serious account of two examples of the folly of massive state-sponsored projects "for the people's good."

What not enough reviewers have taken into account is the book's implicit indictment of modern Western thought, culture & politics on India's -- and Pakistan's -- people.

India & Pakistan are at war primarily because of the original British plan for Partition that created separate Hindu and Muslim states. Skillful Western diplomacy that has played one off against the other for fifty years keeps passions high and these two nations at each other's throats -- to neither's benefit.

By playing India & Pakistan off each other, each nation has been unable to break free from Soviet-style planning and join the rest of the developed world. They instead measure progress by 1940s and 1950s standards, both Soviet and Western, and the results, as outlined by Roy in this book, are devastating.

Now, the World Bank and IMF (whom Roy despise) are propping up the smaller middle-class at the great expense of most of India's population. 600 million illiterates; poor sanitation, hygiene, family planning & health care; and a completely corrupt economy are the problems -- yet Roy shows clearly that the state is moving in a direction farther away from solutions.

The West must take a great deal of responsibility for this, and the passion of Roy can't help but move one to action.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Your opinion is required, July 21, 2006

By	Ann Pai "author of My Other Body" - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

My India-born spouse once described the difference in how he and I had been taught, through subtle societal reward, to make and respond to assertions. "If you say, 'The sky is blue,'" he said, "I think, 'Ann thinks the sky is blue.' But if I say to you, 'The sky is blue,' you say, 'Oh, it is?' You're ready to believe, just because I stated it as fact. That's why you hedge your thoughts with the words, 'I think,' rather than just saying what you think."

I recall that conversation as I read Arundhati Roy's The Cost of Living, in particular, the essay "The Greater Common Good." Because her voice is clear and compelling, my first response is, "Fifty million people have been displaced by ineffective dam-building in India! Good god, what can be done?"

Then I slow down. Remember. "Arundhati Roy thinks that fifty million people have been displaced in India, by dams she thinks are ineffective. Does she make her case?"

She does.

"The Greater Common Good" means to persuade, but its reportage is separable, sentence by sentence, from the argument. Roy's research is compiled, not from debunkable interviews, but from government plans and records, World Bank reviews and estimates of economic benefit and capital cost, and from statistics such as river flow, reservoir levels, areas of irrigated land, numbers of malaria cases, and megawatts of power produced. More than careful, Roy gleefully points out that the Indian government has produced no studies to verify the difference from the lowest baseline calculation of displaced people, or to quantify agricultural benefits gained from completed dam projects.

To follow along, you'll need to work through numbers and a cast of characters, as with any story about accounting and the preservation of power. The payoff to your attentiveness is that once you gather who's done what and at what cost in India's dam-building plans, you are as fully armed as Roy herself to examine the rest of her assertions. You'll have enough facts to agree or disagree with her thesis, "Carelessness cannot account for fifty million disappeared people... Let's not delude ourselves. There is method here, precise, relentless, and 100 percent manmade."

Roy doesn't leave the American reader the familiar out: "I don't live there. I don't have the right to an opinion." Roy works in facts as well as narrative; you'll be hard pressed to evade responsibility for your assent or dissent from her conclusions. Like this one: "Resettling 200,000 people in order to take (or pretend to take) water to 40 million--there's something very wrong with the scale of operations here. This is Fascist math." You can agree or disagree... but reading "The Greater Common Good," you can't wheedle your way out of having a stance.

Two treasures are secreted away inside "The Greater Common Good." One is the story of modern Satyagraha--the practice of nonviolent resistance--how the villagers of the Narmada valley walked into the valley when it was to be flooded, willing to drown. They won a postponement and an independent review of the dam project. The other is a thin, brilliant thread through the narrative: Roy's support of her right as a citizen to research and respond to her government's decisions. It implies the reader has an obligation to respond as well.

In a single sentence, in the heart of the essay, Roy says, "The people whose lives were going to be devastated were neither informed nor consulted nor heard." Her challenge to the reader echoes, unstated: So what do you think of that? What do you think?