Date:22/03/2007 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2007/03/22/stories/2007032205410300.htm

Karnataka - Bangalore

For a perfect development model

Staff Reporter

RELEVANT QUESTIONS: Jeremy Seabrook at a reading of his essay in Bangalore on Wednesday. — Photo: Sampath Kumar G.P.

BANGALORE: "Our development model teaches us the most bizarre lessons. It tells us that perfectly alterable social arrangements are immutable but that we can cheat aging, sickness, pain and even death through the wonders of research," said journalist and writer Jeremy Seabrook at a reading of his latest essay "Twins", at the National Institute of Advanced Studies here on Wednesday.

The essay appeared in a special issue of Granta Magazine, a quarterly journal of new writing.

Mr. Seabrook has authored more than 30 books on a variety of issues in the developed and developing world, as well as contributing to The Guardian, the New Internationalist, Sunday Statesman and many other publications.

He read from the autobiographical essay on his twin brother, saying that couched within the personal tale was a larger cautionary tale of the terrible price human bonds pay in the process of sweeping industrialisation and development, a discussion that touched on the recent happenings at Nandigram.

The reading was followed by a discussion on the issues faced by people within the existing model of development, during which Mr. Seabrook raised the question: "If the current model of being in the world could be replicated indefinitely, would we be happier than if it were rudely interrupted by a vengeance of the planet or some such consequence?"

If one could look at the lives of the rich and powerful today and feel that they are epitomes of true dignity of life, then one might think that proponents of the model had a point.

However, that is not the case to a large extent, he pointed out.

The alternative to the conceptualisation of modernity, he said, should be a better mix of the depth of human capacity with a more sparing reliance on the treasures of the earth.

"There has to be a more equitable balance that doesn't squander our resources and the planet's," he said.

The difficulty, however, has been the elusiveness of an energising myth, a story of hope that can move people in the manner that the ideas that everyone can get rich and that the wretched need only unite to throw off their shackles have done in the past. "The nearest we've come to that is the idea of the planet in peril. But the danger with that is that the privileged people could then say preserve the planet and perish the people," he said.

The writer, who is working on a project on evictions of all kinds, pointed out that the idea of development suggests an organic unfolding from within. However, in recent years, these interventions have come to be forced on people, and have a sense of violence in them. So one should not be astonished that they engender violence in return.