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Over the last 15 years and more, every time I see anything new written by Sunita Narain, I immediately go through it. The simple reason for that is her clarity, passion, erudition and succinctness about the most important issue confronting our very own existence. Her pennings deserve every serious individual’s applause and emulation. In the most recent instance, I have just finished this small book, rather a booklet, by her. The book goes by the name “The Rise of the Neolocals: A generational Reversal of Globalisation.”
The book is all of neatly-written 121 pages. That makes the book highly readable. It is inordinately important that to popularise the holistic message of climate change, the jargon about the issue is lessened and thinner books are written on it. On this count, the author has always been doing an excellent job. It is her untiringly passionate argumentation and remonstrations which has, over time, brought the discourse over the issue front and centre in government policy and public advocacy circles.
In the 11 subsections of the book, she has talked about a myriad of themes. She has started from the ingression of the first Multinational Companies (MNCs) in India and the resultant resistance ensuing from the issue. Her scholarship makes a reader understand better the leap made by India from the clamour to maintain localism and nativism rooted in self-reliance to the driveway of globalisation. This has been followed by a long elaboration on the downward slide of everything that lets us exist: Air, Water, Land, Soil, Rivers, Food chain etc. The differentiation between “Survival Emissions” and “Luxury Emissions” is clearly borne out in the reality of growing inequalities, festering injustices, absent accessibilities for some etc.
It is followed by the illustrations on generational reversal, de-globalisation exemplified in the re-election of Trump, Brexit, parochial political polarisation in Europe and ascendancy of revanchism everywhere in the world. The author has called it the “revenge of the rich.” From China to America, the author makes a reader know that the world is mired in inexplicable contradictions and convergences. This has led to what is alternative reality of sorts, making the real issues get relegated to the background.
Her concerns on the mad-race Uber formalisation are well-justified. It is a truism that there is a cacophonised and organised fixation with the word ‘formal’. But to do so at the cost of diversely tethered informal pathways of economies is a reflection of our collective ignorance.
For me, the best of the chapters of the book is on recycling and circular economy. This unabashedly hypocritical stance of the rich on the waste generated in their backyards is the biggest, beastly insensitive, failure of any overarching framework on the issue. As rightly argued, there is no other way but to make ‘Not-in-my-backyard’ (NIMBY) legally binding. Need to worry and act upon our own sh**!
Our world over the last 3 decades and more has been beset with Convention, Protocols, Trade regimes, Rules, Treaties and what not just to give shape to the deeply discriminatory ideas of the West and the business oligarchs of the east. This has given rise to what has been termed as “ecological globalisation,” concurrent with the economic globalisation.
The book’s brilliance comes to the fore in its emphasis on inclusive globalisation and equitability. The impact of the recession and economic slowdown is very well documented.
The meaningful multilateral institutions are absent today. Every other country aligns itself on the basis of its very short-term and fragile gains. This has smudged the lines between the true left and the true right.
In the conclusions parts of the book lies, perhaps, the meatiest stuff. The shrinking carbon space, the fickleness to posit development against environment and the pitfalls of any kind of smooth transition are covered brilliantly.
A broad-based understanding of the food economy, the tragedy of depleted nutritional security and the intolerance of vegetarians towards food-choices of the non-vegetarians is important in our times. At the end is the ever-increasing enormity and frequency of the disasters and conflicts. The book here captures the sad reality through the attitude of the West towards migrants and the unfortunate.
The book is highly insightful. It is pretty important to read it to understand the basics of the things, which if rectified or slowed down, can sustain our very existence.
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