Roots was sent to me by my dear sister who in turn was given this book by her friend Mukta. Just as it happens with every book that knocks at the doors of my existence, it stood outside for a long time before I opened the door.
Roots is one of those books that change your perspective of how you treat life and people, although I firmly believe that every kind of book possesses this monumental ability. That’s why I cannot read books piecemeal; they affect me a lot. There are a very few books that I have read, and almost every book has left its imprints upon my consciousness.
I wouldn’t call Roots a "literary experience"; it’s a journey, it’s a part of life that you spend with people struggling to survive through inhumanity, injustice, and existential void. It’s a story about how you sustain the warmth of life in the icy caverns of hopelessness so that even if individuals perish, generations survive. After having a child, I know what this means.
Roots is a story of a Mandinka warrior named Kunta Kinte from the Gambia, Africa, who is captured by slave traders, shipped to America under the most base conditions you can imagine as a human being, and then sold to further, interminable sufferings. His jungle instinct makes him run again and again and every time he is captured until his hope begins to fade like a twilight star. You can really feel the crushing of the soul. Here’s a human being full of dreams, knowledge and plans. He is sensitive, religious and philosophical. He has great plans for himself, his family and his village. He is healthy and strong and a trained warrior. And then he is captured, kept like a rat in a sewage wallowing in his own excreta and vomit and disease, beaten again and again, and chained in such a manner that he cannot even lie straight. Once bought, he is kept tied to a poll outside the house like a dog.
Slaves were kept like animals and in fact, worse than animals. Their white captors hated them with great severity. They were not supposed to have human feelings and needs. If you were a slave, total surrender was expected of you and even that too was considered your duty. You were to feel thankful if you were not beaten and humiliated even if you were loyal to your master. People were sold just like chicken. Your husband, wife, parent, sibling, child, friend, could be sold away any day and you could do nothing about it. Sometimes children were auctioned even before they were born. Anything could be done to your loved ones in front of your eyes and you could not intervene because if you did, your master could punish you in whatever way he wanted to, according to the law. Baffling? For the American whites it was as normal as eating chicken.
So under these conditions Kunta Kinte survives and gives rise to this epic story spanning many generations.
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I accident saw her in a YouTube video and was struck by her beauty. When I showed the video to Alka she told me that she’s Leela Naidu. I generally don’t like the profiles of Indian film actresses (except for Madhubala) but Leela Naidu was/is a stunner. Once she was declared one of the top 10 most beautiful women in the world, and I’m not sure about the others, she could easily be among the top beauties. It was nice to know that she didn’t die young, like many other extraordinarily beautiful people.
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Book lovers say that they have an emotional bonding with their books and they don’t prefer digital book readers. I love books; I don’t read them much but I do love them and I am possessive about them. I don’t like people taking away my books and try to get them back if I can. Still, if all the books are taken away from me and instead I am given an e-book reader in which I can digitally store all the books that I have and all the books that I can possibly read or refer to I won’t hesitate even for a single second.
I agree that books have an old world charm and nothing can compare to sitting in a cozy corner reading a beautifully written book. But books waste lots of paper. millions of trees are chopped off everyday to publish books and newspapers and paper, of course. I wouldn’t like so many trees being cut just because you “love” the feel of a real book in your hands.
As far as I know digital e-book readers are not only very easy to use they are also eco-friendly. Right now they are quite costly but I hope very soon their prices will come down. They are constantly working on developing technology that will produce near paper-thin screens so that you will feel like as if you are holding a paper and not a digital appliance. They won’t strain your eyes and you will be able to roll them and put them in your pocket.
So all those great libraries should be emptied of the priceless books they contain? I would say yes. The books begin to rot after a certain period. If they are digitally saved they will be preserved for countless future generations unless an unforeseen catastrophe destroys them. I’m not saying that we should destroy the libraries; they can still be used for reading and researching which is not possible anywhere else.
More than 50% of the wheat that we consume is imported. According to the 2006-7 data the share of agriculture in our GDP is 18.5% and 52% of the country’s workforce is engaged in agriculture. So I wonder how a loan cushion of Rs. 60,000 crores, declared in yesterday’s budget for the year, is going to help the farmers in particular and the country’s agriculture in general. The problem is, most of the farming population is extremely poor and has no means to approach banks and other lending institutions. They mostly depend upon local moneylenders. So this waiver, what a business standard article terms as “the mother of all loan waivers” is only going to make the rich farmers richer. There is nothing theoretically or ideologically wrong in making the rich farmers richer but when the exchequer has to pay for them in the name of helping the poor farmers it becomes a bit of a nag.
There are estimated to be 40 million farmers in the country and with Rs. 60,000 crores every farmer should ideally get Rs. 15,000. Is it really going to help? Even a child who has no basic knowledge of economics (I’m not trying to underestimate a child’s intelligence, it is just a hypothesis) would tell you that it would have really benefited the farmers if this amount of money could be used to build better infrastructure for the farmers, to make better, environment-friendly farming technologies available, and help them pay back the loans whether they had taken them from institutions or local moneylenders. Remember that Chinese proverb that give a fish to a man and you have fed him for a day and teach him how to fish and you have fed him for life?
Instead of loan waivers the farmers need better roads, telecommunications, enough water to irrigate their fields, uninterrupted power supply, and health and education for their loved ones. A one-time waiver doesn’t really solve the problem; it just creates a psychological mirage.
Anyway, this is a political move and no party in its right mind is going to oppose it. In fact the BJP is terming this gargantuan waiver as “too little too late”.
Some people are definitely going to be happy along with the farmers. Excise duty and customs have been reduced to curb the inflation. The tax limit too has been increased; people earning Rs. 500,000 per year will be able to save Rs. 50,000 per year now and that means some extra cash to buy things and this may spur the sluggish industrial growth.
What would I do were I given Rs. 7,50,884 crores to spend on the country? There are three areas of major concern: defense, infrastructure and human resources. The expenditure on defense and defense-related R&D cannot be underestimated. With Pakistan ready to create mischief perpetually and China comes knocking at our doors at the drop of a hat; defense is something we cannot ignore. So I would spend around 20% and not 14%. You can see for yourself how serious the government is for the safety of the country that it is waiving Rs. 60,000 (around $15 billion) crores and is allocating Rs 1,05,600 ($26.4 billion) to defense.
Then I would allocate 25% to education and health. Our country needs proper education both in terms of human resources as well as infrastructure, and we need healthy people. People in India are extremely weak and that is the major reason why as the country we don’t perform the way we should. There is some problem with our dieting habits because even economically well-off people in India don’t seem fit and healthy. Elementary health services would be totally free and foods that give us nourishment would be dirt cheap.
Our current education system might be producing better scientists and computer programmers but it is definitely not producing better and healthier citizens; something drastically lacks. This allocation would include world-class facilities to both students and teachers. We need more schools and higher pays for teachers so that just like management and technology teaching too becomes a financially satisfying career. Most of the people become teachers because either they are too lazy to do anything else or they don’t get a job anywhere else. I would also like the adult population to get educated or at least literate so I would provide financial incentives to the grown-ups for joining evening classes.
What are we left with now? 55%. 30% would go into developing countrywide infrastructure. This should include roads and railways, and other structures that make life easy as well as productive. This will not only improve quality of life in general it will also provide long-term employment to millions of people. I would invest more on technologies and methodologies that don’t screw up with environment and flora and fauna. Power and electricity and telecommunications are the backbone of any growing economy so they deserve more focus and investment.
5% would go towards improving internal security and 10% would go towards improving the law and order. In my economy people won’t need loan waivers and subsidies, not even as incentives.
The remaining 10% could go towards things that got left above. Seems like a silly list. Well, I’m not an economist.
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