The no logo nation

My 45 year old neighboring lady asked me why I was out on such a fine morning with a decent sized bucket in my hand with the intention of collecting money for the war affected people of Iraq. This happened some while ago, I know iraq aint hot topic anymore. I didn’t have a good answer to give her especially since the honest answer had something to do with my craving for booze. My neighbor, call her madam y, shooed me away saying her sons hard earned money from a prominent software mnc( I wont name it,whew) is not to be wasted like this. After all,what connection does she has with people of iraq or Africa or wherever. Just shoo. And shoo I did.

But after a couple of days I went back to her with an apt answer that was found by me calling up all the intellectual prowess in me as well as the local drugstore. I knocked the door and out came madam y. I gave her my answer. With some research(ahem) I’ve found that the company for which ur son is working has taken up projects for pepsico. Now imagine that if at some war ravaged space in the world like iraq, if the pepsico plants there gets bombed( yes, they do have pepsi and coke plants in iraq and I know they wont ever get bombed,only the neighboring huts), pepsico would have to slash back on their project outsourcing and the mnc for which ur dear son is working may need to cancel some projects might leading to cutting off of employees. Then where would ur son be? Inside or outside.

Of course it was a whole lotta bullshit but the old dame got scared all the same and looking at the expensive kanchipuram sari she had on, asked me to wait and gave me some money for iraq. I told her as a bonus yet another thing before parting. Consider the mnc for which ur dear son is working. They need to put up a new campus or office and evicts more than a handful of farmers to acquire the land for the purpose. Your son has got job in that particular office. The farmers of course got a ‘decent’ compensation from the government after which they are roaming the streets looking around for a tree with proper heights to commit suicide. No matter to which nation the farmer belongs, now don’t u think that u, ur son and the farmer are all connected and u do have a liability to those farmers? Of course, I said all of this since in the back of my mind I’ve already planned to get the next bucket with the cause of ‘evicted farmers of bangladesh’ tagged to it. Got to have booze. But madam y’s response put a curb on it. She declared-“why would I give a fuck about some fucking farmer? My son aint no farmer, he is a highly paid and respected employee in a highly esteemed company.”

My mom always says that I have very limited intellect when it comes to practical things. Maybe she is right. I certainly didn’t have any answer to madam y’s very practical question.

Those of u who don’t want to be bugged by such questions and want to know more about anti-globalisation activities or about the effects of globalization on classes of people, referring the following would help:

1. no logo (non fiction book by Naomi klein)

2. constant gardener(movie by Fernando Meirelles)

3. blood diamond(movie by Edward zwick)

4. The corporation(documentary by Mark Achbar & Jennifer Abbott)

5. 1000 days and a dream(documentary by biju viswanath)

6. fences and windows(non fiction book by Naomi klein)

7. run a google search on ‘zapatista’