Tuesday, May 22, 2007

A New World -and Onwards To a Newer World

From the BBC :-

"No more agriculture for us . It doesn't feed us, it doesn't feed our children. We will move to the cities and work as tea bearers, and live in Mumbai's slums if we have to - it is better than starving." - Dharampul Jarundhe , a farmer in the west of India


Seventy per cent of India's people make their living on the land. Millions of farmers, spread out across rural India, have had to watch the value of their products depreciate on the international markets and are at the mercy of the whims and fancies of economic terms like the demand and supply curve .

They are caught in the cycle of debt and drought, and year after year life gets worse.


Critics of globalisation say the forces of free market style economics are to blame for the rising income inequality between the India of the haves, and the India of the have-nots.


"Is this what you call progress?" asks Jaideep Hardlikar, a farmer activist and a journalist. "I think it's loot by a few of the majority. "


Yet , as was discovered when Capitalism itself was a revolutionary movement in the 16th-18th centuries , sweeping away the aristocratic power under feudalism over the peasantry , re-interpreting the world that had been bound by theology , new progressive social relationships were born from the new capitalist mode of production and its new means of production , to-days Indian society and culture is also changing and will continue to change .


"It's a cliché now, isn't it, but it's still true. I am making more money than my parents could have ever dreamed of, and as an Indian woman that is so totally liberating. I don't need to depend on my parents for money, I don't need to depend on a husband for money. I can choose to get married later if I want to. I may not even need to get married. The opportunities that have opened up for me are mind-boggling." - 25-year-old Devika, who works at a call centre in Mumbai .


Then ,later , comes the understanding that with the rose there is the thorn , and the bloody price of capitalism is a steep cost to bear , which the new working class of India will learn about the hard way.

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