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of the 946 billionaires featuring on the Forbes' list of richest are Indian citizens. This is being posed as India's march forward. But is this so?
They are stinking rich. Their richness, wealth stinks. Is this a complement? But still identity-hungry Indians toiling in global sweatshops - academic, industrial etc, are asked to rejoice in the growing capacity of a few to stink. This world is really a PORCILE - with the number of Indians stinkers being only next to Russians (another group of gangster capitalists, who emerged during the post 1989 loot of public property), with the US and Germans, being front-runners.
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I killed my father. I ate human flesh and I quiver with joy." Farmer suicides are increasing with a growing number of underemployeds being ravished in the panopticon world of new industries, call centres and peripheral informal sector units, while we are asked to quiver with joy.
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Absolute Poverty (not just relative poverty with growing divide between rich and poor, which is generally recognised) is increasing, as people are more and more dispossessed, alienated from their means of production, losing control over their conditions of production. Even if we find consumerism rising - with new gadgets cropping up in the home of the new poor, it only increases her material and mental destitution and dependence - this is not a sign of enrichment. The secret of the billionaires' wealth too is not more gadgets and things at home, but their ability to control over the majority's means and conditions of production. Then why more gadgets and things at home be the parameters of judging the poor's poverty?
