The Beautiful And The Damned (2011) - Plot & Excerpts
It didn’t seem to matter where I was – in Delhi, Calcutta, Bangalore or Hyderabad – everywhere the metropolis was expanding, thrusting out the spokes of its highways and throwing up office parks, apartment complexes and SEZs on what until recently had been wetlands or agricultural plots. In places like Gurgaon, the transformation was complete. In other areas, many of the buildings were still shells, altars being prayed over by vast yellow construction cranes, but the process was nevertheless under way. The emphasis on such urban expansion conceals what might be happening to Indian farmers, who are utterly absent from mainstream accounts of progress. There are some solitary efforts to write about what is happening to them, as in the work of the journalist P. Sainath – who first documented the devastation of rural India in 1996 in his book Everybody Loves a Good Drought and who continues to report on this in the Hindu newspaper – or in the bleak roll of names put up by activists on a blog on farmer suicides.
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