Suketu Mehta’s editorial in the NYT on the crisis in Bombay is clearly well-intentioned, and mostly good, but his insistence on the healing power of money seems to miss the mark somehow. We should be talking about the relationships between religion and money, specifically economic inequality, instead of seeing these two issues as antagonistic. Anyway, I really like Bombay, and it was insane to see pictures of the Taj on fire. In honor of Bombay, here is a picture of Eli’s favorite Bombay chai stand, outside a university, taken last summer.
Fresh chai for only 5 rupees! Good points about the chai and critiquing Mehta for neglecting the links between religion and economic inequality. Mehta’s basically saying ‘keep doing the same thing - spend money, work hard, have a good time.’ What he misses is that the status quo of capitalism is the problem. (I find it especially ridiculous that Mehta would promote “the stock market” in this time of another crisis of capitalism.) The capitalist state excludes the poor from politics in this world, with shrinking of political space to representation through parties, which are run like family firms. Politically disempowered poor people can find avenues for some resolution of their grievances through religions, even if this resolution takes place not in this world but the afterlife under God’s judgement. Religions give people a transcendental, dogmatic ideology that can give coherent direction to their political passions, and thereby direct them into meaningful collective action, whether prayer or violence. These “terrorist” attacks are not the result of religion per se, but from its conjuncture with the dispossessions, extreme inequalities, and political de-democratizations of capitalism.
