Page 26 - THE CHANGING WORLD OF RAY

established categorizations, counter political ideologies

in terms of class, gender, (i.e. neoliberal capitalism,

ethnicity, religion, economic neo-Marxism, nationalism,

status, political party, color, neo-theocracy, and so on)

political party, football team, echoing the two extreme

car, house, profile, and style, poles as portrayed in Ray’s

are relentlessly born, reborn, takes on the Swadeshi and
evolving, revived, forgotten, the Naxalite movements,

mixed, fused, and discarded. equally contribute to a vio-

In a world built on massive lently homogeneous ‘modern

debt, the old and hateful ide- world’. But Ray’s human-

als of purity are nowadays ism tells us that this world

institutionalized, milita- belongs to us, we are the
rized, professionalized, and world. In the mist of burn-

air-conditioned; for the en- ing plastic rubbish, death

tire world becomes increas- and happiness walk hand-in

ingly cast-sized. hand; for human Touch can-

This homogeniza- not exist elsewhere but here.

tion of world society into a The Walls have been raised
gigantic supermarket is ac- to protect ‘us’ from ‘them’,

companied by the image of but the power of a smile

absolute poverty amongst tears them down in pieces.

children living in slums

without access to clean wa-

ter, breathing burning plas-

tic, right next to luxurious
temples and shopping-molls

-from Delhi to Athens-. This

‘Western’ way of life is kept

separately, protected even

by recruiting the military

for the indulgence of small

elites, as if it is a sacred
cow. On the other extreme,