Slumdog Millionaire

One of my all time favorites, Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire.

In the spirit of the film's celebration of the vernacular (Hindi), I have christened it Slumkutta Krarorpati.

It's surreal

When have you last heard the expression, "It's surreal!"

All the time, is what I say. 

The word "surreal" has become synonymous to "weird" or "strange".

Yet, that's not what surreal means.

Andrea Scott of the New Yorker Magazine, revisits the word in context of surrealism in the art world. 

She writes of Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte in anticipation of a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Arts from September 28 to January 12 ("Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary"). 

Magritte's art created a jangling effect on the beholder's sensibilities because he transposed the banal and the unnerving.

Case in point is the painting "Time Transfixed":

How does one make sense of the locomotive that floats indelibly in the fireplace, and in our "normal" thought we don't instinctively associate a locomotive with a bourgeois domestic accoutrement like a fireplace.

But the presence of the dangling locomotive from a living room structure does alter our perception of both the locomotive and the fireplace, and together the two transform the ordinary scene into a strange one.

The effect in totality is surreal. 

When the ordinary becomes strange, it's surreal. 

According to Scott, Magritte "saw himself as a secret agent in the war on bourgeois values, and described his mission as a restoring of the familiar to the strange, because he felt that too often we tend to reduce what is strange to what is familiar.

In other words, the bourgeois domesticates and makes natural that which is really created/constructed, whether it be objects or values.

So that's surrealism 101 for you, and next time I hear the word surreal uttered when a centaur appears in the middle of Time Square, I'll wince.

What binds farmers in rural India to the working class in New Jersey?

Scarcity.

Poverty has become a convergence point for many disciplines, including the behavioral sciences.

Harvard behavioral scientists, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir have written a new book on poverty and how it affects those who suffer under its enormous stress: Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much.

Being poor, we know, is a stressful state of being and poverty is correlated to stress-induced diseases and shorter life spans; Mullainathan and Shafir attribute to poverty something more than just stress. They claim that poverty shrinks the human brain's "bandwidth."

Simply put, if a person is poor and has to worry about where money for rent or a monthly mortgage will come from, the person's brain gets inside a hermetic "tunnel" and stays locked up there. A large chunk of the brain's bandwidth gets used up in a single task and other tasks remain unattended to. So a poor person loses the capacity to make other life-decisions effectively.

Worrying about money when it is tight captures our brains. It reduces our cognitive capacity — especially our abstract intelligence, which we use for problem-solving. It also reduces our executive control, which governs planning, impulses and willpower. The bad decisions of the poor, say the authors, are not a product of bad character or low native intelligence. They are a product of poverty itself. Your natural capability doesn’t decrease when you experience scarcity. But less of that capacity is available for use. If you put a middle-class person into a situation of scarcity, she will behave like a poor person.

Here is Eldar Shafir giving a TedEx talk on why the poor make bad decisions and choices:

How to be good and why?

The short film above, is a moving testimony of how good actions are a long-term investment, more valuable, or as valuable as, financial investment.

Human kindness might be the only recourse to solving the problem of health care. 

A Tale of Three Cities: India's entry into Modernity

What Marx said: Marx's prophecy: In the 19th Century Karl Marx observed that India, among other nations in the Non-West, is pre or non-modern, as it lacked vital structures of modernity, i.e. a thriving industrial/manufacturing base. It should therefore be yanked into modernity through "violence" if it needs be, because on its own India cannot progress and needs the guidance of Europe.

In other words, it's a good thing that Britain and in fits and sparks other European nations, colonized India.

It's interesting that Marx suspended his usual humanitarian principles when it came to judging what makes the non-West modern.

The West is modern and will always be the image of the non-West's future. So to be modern is to recast oneself in the image of the West.

Fast forwarding into the 21st century India, let's look for some markers of modernity:

Is the 21st century Indian Middle Class "modern"?

A Middle Class family in pictures.

UB City: India's glitziest shopping mall.

There is an "Indian dream" equivalent to the "American dream." (Upward mobility).

"The Indian middle class is hungry for new experiences and is optimistic," observes Mr. Dilip Kapur, founder/CEO of Hi-Design, an Indian luxury leather goods firm, and adds that for retailers and brand builders like us it is explosively exciting."

In essence, the Indian middle class is fulfilling Marx's prophecy of becoming "modern" by asserting their consumption power.

The definition of "modern" has radically changed since the time of Marx, but in the 21st century, wealth and upward mobility, and consumption are clear markers of what it means to be modern.

By this definition, the likes of Mukesh Ambani, one of India's super rich, (sort of an Indian Warren Buffet), is ultra modern.

In other words, the story of India's "rise" and by default, the story of her coming of age into the globe as a "modern" nation, is the story of the middle and the rich class.

What about those left behind and excluded from the narrative?

Here's what journalist, activist and Booker Prize winning author, Arundhati Roy has to say about the narrative of modern and rising India:

"There are other ways of being modern" says Roy and the shapers of this narrative of modernity in 21st century India are the rural indigenous and urban poor, who are also the displaced rural indigenous.

The other India: Listen to how this other India is perceived in one of the many visions of aspirational India:

Aman Sethi's A Free Man is about the other India that too, as Roy says in her interview, has its own vision of what it means to be modern in contemporary India.

Gaining visibility

The short video tells the story of the son of African American and Haitian American parents growing up black in New York City, and attending Dalton, the nation's most competitive Preparatory School.

Dalton is also a white school where students are predominantly white and hail from privileged backgrounds.

In a moment in the film the class gathers around a discussion of Ralph Ellison's Invisible man which, among other things, address the thorny issue of a white denial of the black presence in America.

Our little protagonist, inserts himself into the white presence, but as the film shows, gaining full-fledged visibility is not easy.

A financial history of the world

Nial Ferguson's Documentary, The Ascent of Money traces the historical rise of money as the global hegemon.

This should pair well, like a thesis and an antithesis, with the animated history of poverty in the world, Poor Us (This is the second time this film finds place on my blog, but it's differently placed here, or differentially).

Globalizing a narrative

On September 11 2013 something (minor) happened: I understood what it means to "globalize" and why it's important to globalize stories.

The term globalization, despite having degenerated to a one-size-fits-all word that is used loosely in academic and non-academic circles, fundamentally refers to a dynamic process of integration--of the world.

So does its verb form "globalize"; to "globalize" would mean to include those that had been previously excluded, especially in stories.

On the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, prime time Television did its level best to remind us that the story of the event hasn't been fully globalized yet.

I realized this in the course of a conversation I had with my mother, who was watching an NBC-produced recreation, a sort of a documentary, if you will, of the attacks.

I observed the repetitiousness of it all and wished there were some fresh interpretations.

My mother said, "but this really happened; they're showing actually what happened that day."

She was referring to the twin stories of heroism on the part of the ordinary American citizens who were on board American Airlines flight 11 and United flight 93, respectively.

"There is more to the story," I said, than just the attack and the act of valiance on the part of the victims.

What more can be said, my mother pondered.

Why, what about the perspective of the attackers?

My mother was taken a bit aback; how can attackers have a story? They are just attackers.

I launched into a mini-spiel on how an event, especially historical one's have many actors and to give a realistic picture of the event, all perspectives need to be included and maybe then the event will look less like a sentimental and one-sided leaf out of a mythology of saints and sinners and more like what it is--a historical event that is the culmination of a complex chain of causes and effects.

My mother gamely listened to my spiel and was half in accord with me.

To "globalize" the story of 9/11 is to make room for the perspectives and voices of those whose perspectives and voices have been excised, i.e. those of the "attackers."

By extension, to globalize any narrative would be to extend the courtesy of this accommodation, to integrate as it were, stuff that had been left out when they were constructed in a unipolar world.

The multipolar world order demands nothing short of globalized stories; stories told the same way sound jarring and parochial.

Thought as food

In these days when even holders of advanced degrees have to apply for food stamps to fill their stomachs in America, it's a good idea to scale down our culinary desires and cook recipes from Jean Paul Sartre's Cookbook.

I especially recommend the "free will soup." It's cheaper than Ramen.

P.S. The cartoon is also a great fresher course in Existentialism.

No beauty in American poverty

Two books on poverty in the United States are separated by 50 odd years.

Michael Harrington's The Other America, can be contextualized in the powerful words of Martin Luther King Jr.: "The Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of affluence." Back then, during the pre-civil rights era, the "Other" America would have been identified with Black America.

The American poor in Sasha Abramsky cut across color lines and the causes behind poverty are diverse and complex. 

The dictum "give them freedom and they will earn their bread" may have between the 1960s and today have morphed into "There is no freedom without bread."

Technology triumphs food

As the picture above shows, Owsley County in Kentucky is a pretty place. But like the Appalachian region, has the distinction of being the nations’ poorest county, with the lowest household income of any county in the United States.

The County is 98% white and 81% Republican. More than half of Owsley County residents live below the poverty line and depend on Food Stamps, a Federal food assistance program that was hit hard yesterday when House Republicans voted to cut it drastically.

If the House Republicans bill passes, 3.8 million Americans will relapse below the poverty line by 2014. A large chunk of Owsley residents will go hungry. 

A paradox: There is Federal Food Assistance and then there is Federal Wireless Assistance, to “empower” the poor by giving them free cell phones. Walk down the streets of the Bronx in New York City, and men and women wearing nice clothes (looking very governmental), might just accost you, like a Jehovah’s Witness, and ask if you’re on any one of the government programs, If you are then you qualify for a free cell phone and free (albeit limited) connectivity [Assurance and Safelink Wireless, are two popular providers of “free government cell phones.”].

Is one to understand then it’s mandatory to provide free connectivity to the poor, but it’s not mandatory to subsidize their basic food consumption? How odd this paradox is. I suppose it’s based on the assumption that while technology is indispensable, food isn’t.

Food Stamps=freeloading, while free connectivity=a step toward self-empowerment?

As the very Parisian Marie Antoinette said (I am paraphrasing), give the poor cakes and they'll be happy. The 21st century equivalent of the 17th century Marie Antoinette "cake" paradigm is technology.

And why isn't there an App yet for downloading Food Stamps fast?

Twenty-first century Teepees

A native American tent like the one above is being sold on Etsy for $160. You could go camping in one of these to "de-stress".

But for many tent-living is not simply a recreational interlude; it's a necessity as the video on Fresno's "tent city" shows.

I watched this video on the heels of reading Robert Neuwirth's Shadow Cities, a ethnographic study of the world's "squatter cities."

There aren't any squatters in the U.S. as codified property/ownership rights prohibit the building of homes on land that one doesn't own and have a title deed for. But on account of the recession combined with high cost of renting and foreclosures, many mow-income Americans have been forced to live inside tents on land that is in a liminal zone between being owned and not owned.

What emerges from the video is a spirit--of positivity and responsibility. Just as squatter city residents demonstrate a high degree of self-reliance, so do the residents of tent cities: they have a history, they have lives and they even double up as sanitation workers.

The woman in the video speaks of Mark Twain, who had to leave home in rural Mississippi because his parents couldn't afford to feed their children, became great in a milieu akin to that of a tent city. The woman has hopes for her son, whom she calls "brilliant," and perhaps imagines a Twain-like greatness for him.

Master of the Paranoid Art

An Illustration of Thomas Pynchon's "Bleeding Edge"

Thomas Pynchon writes his new novel to give a novel interpretation of the "war on terror," a war that commenced with the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

I'll let Jonathan Lethem's evocative review of the book do the telling of what Pynchon's Bleeding Edge is about and how it's remarkably about what it's about.

Bleeding Edge is a masterpiece of Paranoid Art, which accomplishes what according to Lethem, Complacent Art chooses to avoid:

Paranoid art knows the more terrifying (and inevitable) discoveries are further questions. Paranoid art traffics in interpretation, and beckons interpretation from its audience; it distrusts even itself, and so becomes the urgent opposite of complacent art.

 Pynchon offers no monstrously simple answer to the question of the attacks on America. An answer to "Why it happened?" is looped back into "Modernity.":

In Pynchon’s view, modernity’s systems of liberation and enlightenment — railway and post, the Internet, etc. — perpetually collapse into capitalism’s Black Iron Prison of enclosure, monopoly and surveillance. The rolling frontier (or bleeding edge) of this collapse is where we persistently and helplessly live. His characters take sustenance on what scraps of freedom fall from the conveyor belt of this ruthless conversion machine, like the house cat at home in the butcher’s shop. In Joyce’s formulation, history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake. For Pynchon, history is a nightmare within which we must become lucid dreamers.

 Another review of the novel can be found here.

Pinched by Pynchon

What might only be a simple point on the workday cycle . . . becomes a million pedestrian dramas, each one charged with mystery, more intense than high-barometer daylight can ever allow. Everything changes. There’s that clean, rained-on smell. The traffic noise gets liquefied. Reflections from the street into the windows of city buses fill the bus interiors with unreadable 3-D images, as surface unaccountably transforms to volume. Average pushy Manhattan schmucks crowding the sidewalks also pick up some depth, some purpose — they smile, they slow down, even with a cellular phone stuck in their ear they are more apt to be singing to somebody than yakking. Some are observed taking houseplants for walks in the rain. Even the lightest umbrella-to-umbrella contact can be erotic.

A description of uptown Uptown Manhattan in the rain in Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Bleeding Edge.

Women's beauty, women's duty

I enjoy watching Miss America beauty pageants, especially the part where the final contestants are asked questions about poverty, International politics and education, to name a few grandiose topics.

The all-round pretence is that the responses, which supposedly manifest the woman's intellectuality and social and moral compass, will be the clincher. The woman who gives the best answer will win the crown of America's most "beautiful" female (under 21 and under 140 lb of body weight).

My pleasure is perverse: it's generated by the ways in which the contestants, usually very thin and tall women, hem and haw, and usually stumble in their "spontaneous" responses.

My pleasure, as Aristotle would say, is entirely dependent on the contestants' slipping and falling, to make me laugh, when answering questions of social, moral and political gravity. 

This year there will be more pleasure in store because I hear that a record number of women had auditioned for the beauty pageant. The pageant will be held in Atlantic City, a location that has historical resonance because this is where feminists had gathered to protest the blatant sexist crudity of the pageant in 1968.

I hope one of the questions this time is about Syria's Bashar Assad and chemical weapons and what the bone-revealing beauties (I swear, their shoulder bones stick out of their flesh, I've seen it) think of Vladimir Putin's ascension from rogue politician to global peace-broker.

It's said that women's "beauty" is celebrated in the Miss USA and other beauty pageants across the globe.

Courtney Martin, a writer on women's health and other issues, says that it is any self-respecting woman's duty to protest the particular image of women's beauty that the Miss USA pageant sells.

Why? Because:

Authentic, messy, transcendent beauty cannot be scored. It isn't tamed, plucked, planned, premeditated or rehearsed, and people like Donald Trump, who own the Miss USA beauty pageant, aren't purveyors of it.
Real beauty is about resilience: Girls and women who have been through something and come out the other side with an idiosyncratic scar or a hard-earned wrinkle, like the first lines of a powerful story. If there were a pageant where girls were asked, "When did you really get lost and how did you find your way back to yourself?" I would be there myself.
Beauty pageants should die because they are money making machines fueled by female insecurity and submission.
Beauty is an organic process, not a contest.

Bakeries as havens

We all have our special places where we find, or arrive at, a certain thing called peace of mind.

It's hard to define what "peace of mind" is, but one can at least identify a site, as it were, where it's experienced.

Delia Ephron, American bestselling author (and the screen writer of such perennial favorites like Sleepless in Seattle) names a bakery as her place of peace.

Peace of mind is a feeling where she says she has intimations of having had it all. In the process of writing of the American obsession with "having it all," Ephron takes a crack at its inadequacy:

Having it all seems to breed wanting more. And since we can’t have it all because it is statistically impossible, and since there is no such thing as more than all, the whole notion seems, I’m sorry to say, depressingly American.

In many countries, having it all is learning to read. Having it all is getting to choose whom you love. Having it all is walking to school without worrying that you might get raped on the way.

Having it all is like an "eclipse:

To me, having it all — if one wants to define it at all — is the magical time when what you want and what you have match up. Like an eclipse. A total eclipse is when the moon is at its perigee, the earth is at its greatest distance from the sun, and when the sun is observed near zenith. I have no idea what that means. I got the description off a science Web site, but one thing is clear: it’s rare. This eclipse never lasts more than seven minutes and 31 seconds.

Having it all is also a moment of peace:

Personally, I believe having it all can last longer than that. It might be a fleeting moment — drinking a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning when the light is especially bright. It might also be a few undisturbed hours with a novel I’m in love with, a three-hour lunch with my best friend, reading “Goodnight Moon” to a child, watching a Nadal-Federer match. Having it all definitely involves an ability to seize the moment, especially when it comes to sports. It can be eating in bed when you’re living on your own for the first time or the first weeks of a new job when everything is new, uncertain and a bit scary. It’s when all your senses are engaged. It’s when you feel at peace with someone you love. And that isn’t often. Loving someone and being at peace with him (or her) are two different things. Having it all are moments in life when you suspend judgment. It’s when I attain that elusive thing called peace of mind.

Not particularly American, unquantifiable, unidentifiable, different for everyone, but you know it when you have it.

Which is why I love bakeries. Peace descends the second I enter, the second I smell the intoxicating aroma of fresh bread, see apricot cookies with scalloped edges, chocolate dreams, cinnamon and raisin concoctions, flights of a baker’s imagination, and I know I am the luckiest person in the world. At that moment, in spite of statistical proof that this is not possible, I have it all. And not only that, I can have more.

Black lesbian

It's a good thing that there is a movie on the experience of a black lesbian. I'm so tired of seeing blacks, men or women, depicted only within the framework of poverty, class struggle and race.

I hear Pariah, a film that won critical accolades at the 2011 Sundance festival, is a saga of a black teen's tempestuous journey through sexual identity.

Pariah is written by precocious African American writer (who went into film writing after getting an MBA in finance), Dee Rees.

"I'm broken, but I am free," says the protagonist of Pariah.

A conversion table for Britishisms

British politeness is no different from American politeness in that sometimes it's just plain rhetorical.

The Britishers, like their counterparts in the United States, say things they don't really mean.

The following is a conversion table that translates British expressions of politeness into the unpleasant truths which such politeness disguises:

WHAT THE BRITISH SAY	WHAT THE BRITISH MEAN	WHAT FOREIGNERS UNDERSTAND
I hear what you say	I disagree and do not want to discuss it further	He accepts my point of view
With the greatest respect	You are an idiot	He is listening to me
That's not bad	That's good	That's poor
That is a very brave proposal	You are insane	He thinks I have courage
Quite good	A bit disappointing	Quite good
I would suggest	Do it or be prepared to justify yourself	Think about the idea, but do what you like
Oh, incidentally/ by the way	The primary purpose of our discussion is	That is not very important
I was a bit disappointed that	I am annoyed that	It doesn't really matter
Very interesting	That is clearly nonsense	They are impressed
I'll bear it in mind	I've forgotten it already	They will probably do it
I'm sure it's my fault	It's your fault	Why do they think it was their fault?
You must come for dinner	It's not an invitation, I'm just being polite	I will get an invitation soon
I almost agree	I don't agree at all	He's not far from agreement
I only have a few minor comments	Please rewrite completely	He has found a few typos
Could we consider some other options	I don't like your idea	They have not yet decided

Food diversity

I am a big proponent of diversity, in society, culture and even in the food that we consume.

The restaurant critics interviewed in the video above, say they've savored everything in the realm of food, ranging from cow brain to grasshoppers.

When insects are fried rightly and salted with grace, they are worth eating, says one food critic. She even recommends the consumption of insects, as they are a great source of protein.

One thing none of the critics have eaten is the grasshopper taco. 

They've had the hopper and the taco separately but not the "bug taco."

New Bengal?

A video that claims to advertise Bengal, an ex-illustrious state of India, as a "melting pot" where "diversity" reigns.

I caught a fleeting, almost ephemeral glimpse of a few Chinese faces. That's "diversity" Indian style.

If this is the "new" Bengal, I want to know what's so new about seeing the same old fat faces who have been strutting the cultural landscape of Kolkata? Ranjit Mullick? Rudraprashad Sengupta? Soumitra Chatterjee? New? Young? Fresh?

And the music: It's abysmal. To be honest, the video doesn't reflect a dynamic or modern Bengal, but the timeless chimera that Tagore created in his fiction--the "Bangala'r Maati and Bangla'r Jol" province that served the poet's imagination well.

The real Bengal, where is it? The mall's? The metro? Where's the business sector? Any new music in the offing? Where's the global Kolkata we so hear of? The sushi dens and the Pizza Huts? They too are legitimate nodes of the Bangla geography aren't they?

How the world got poorer

History is usually (and cynically) seen to be the story of the winners.

The Documentary, Poor Us, tells the history of the so-called "losers."

The poor in our modern era, are unfairly, and contra-historically, considered to be the "losers". But as this film shows, the "poor" aren't losers but a by product of historical processes. 

The world, as we learn has got poorer, beginning with the proto-industrial and the industrial eras. The wise voice of Karl Marx says that the poverty we witness in the world wouldn't have happened without capitalist system of production.

A story of Bin Men

The BBC has an interesting series of Documentaries called the "Toughest Places." 

The series has "The Toughest Place to Drive a Cab," "The Toughest Place to be a Prostitute," etc.

The series focuses on the more basic professions in the world, and the "Toughest Place to be a Bin Man," is about scavengers. It's a job we rarely talk about, but without scavengers where would the shitters who live in fancy places be? I mean, as long as there are humans, there will be waste and there will be shit.

A London trash man spends 10 days in Jakarta, Indonesia to live the life, as it were, of an Indonesian trash man.

In essence, he encounters a different culture.

What's interesting about this film, is that the person who goes to the "other" place, the non-West, that is, isn't white and isn't from a privileged background in the west.

He is a black British, the son of West Indian immigrants to Britain. He makes a living by picking up trash in neighborhoods that range from the crutty council one's to the swanky. He has a truck with advanced technology and air conditioning; he has a regular pay and a pension to boot. In other words, he is secure, till the time he is sacked. 

In Jakarta all these conditions are absent for the Indonesian Bin Man, Imam, whose job the British Bin Man takes on for 10 days.

While the Documentary doesn't have the "the Western savior" attitude, it does have a bit of a glorification of the life of the British Bin Man. It's as though the British Bin Man suffers from zero insecurities and there are no challenges in his work just because it's in London. 

The Documentary does not interrogate the material conditions of the British Bin Man's life. Is he poor by London standards? 

The Indonesian Bin Man, is by contrast, poor and doomed to die as a trash collector with zero security.

The film ends on a note of pious egalitarianism, as the British bin Man, back in London, reflects on how he and his Indonesian counterpart are the "same", they are "brothers," even; it's that they are born in different places and that makes the big difference.

It's fate, as they say.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist and thoughts on fundamentalism

Mohsin Hamid's 2007 novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist revisits the notion of fundamentalism in interesting ways.

First, I feel, it uncouples fundamentalism from terrorism and takes the former as a state of mind.

Fundamentalism is consequently yanked out of the geographical or religious demesne called the "Middle East" and "Islam" respectively, and given a somewhat universal connotation.

Anyone can be a fundamentalist in thought. A fundamentalist state of mind is one which has a single belief arrived at through a systematic rejection of possibilities, alternatives, the understanding that all "truths" are provisional or impermanent and prevails till the time an experience (or what we call "reality") comes and scuttles it.

A fundamentalist state of mind is not very inclusive; it tends to exclude everything that might be challenging the single truth in which the fundamentalist mind is secure.

Why should I even say, "belief"; in his Middle East travelogue, Beyond Belief, writer V.S. Naipaul puts the fundamentalist state of mind as being "beyond" the "reach" of "belief." Belief, in an ordinary sense of the term, is amenable to reason, but the culture of irrational fundamentalism that Naipaul encounters in his conversations with modern Iranians and Pakistanis, is not amenable to change, which is a byword for reason in the book.

The Muslim subjects in Beyond Belief fundamentally cling to their truth that the West is evil.

So, the fundamentalist state of mind, I could say, is beyond belief.

In Hamid's novel, the bearer of the most rigid state of mind, is not a person or a group of people, but an entity, called the transnational corporation. The corporation is not a person, as even a legal novice will tell you, but certainly its run by a group of persons. The persons at the helm of these corporations pursue a belief--in the supremacy of the freemarket economy, of the unhindered flow of capital across national borders and of the absolute necessity of profit at the cost of all other human or non-human concerns.

The transnational corporation in the novel embarks on a series of financial "conquests" in developing nations in the name of divesting and restructuring for the sake of maximizing profits. The corporation in question advises companies that have fallen sick on how to get back in shape. To put these companies back in shape, livelihoods of workers have to be sacrificed.

So the corporation, in the grip of a fundamentalist state of mind sacrifices others' interests for the sake of profit.

An analogy in the world of persons, would be the ambitious and driven person. The ambitious and driven person, perhaps out of necessity, enters into a fundamentalist state of mind: She/he has a single truth to believe in, which is that self-progress at the material level has to be achieved at any cost, and whatever stands in the way of that progress has to be ignored or turned a blind eye to.

Ambition, As Ernest Hemingway once said, is a horrific bitch (he was alluding to the famous actress and his interlocutor in the sphere of belletre-ism). A bitch it is, but it is also a place holder for the fundamentalist state of mind.

At a more benign level, the robot is by function a fundamentalist, it will do and "think" as it is programmed to do and "think". To change it's single way of doing and thinking the entire robot has to be reprogrammed, and then the vicious cycle of fundamentalism will set in. Only when a robot is invested with "muscles of simultaneity" (author Junot Diaz's description of a complex mind), will it be able to move beyond a fundamentalist state of mind.