1. It does not respond to the gravity and urgency of the economic, social, and ecological crises gripping the world today.
2. It fails to identify the underlying causes of these multiple convergent crises.
3. It repeats many prescriptions that have caused or contributed to unsustainable development.
4. Finally, it challenges civl society to continue engagement.

“There are Hindi words from those days I used so often, they’re hardwired for all time: ‘terrorism,’ ‘fanaticism,’ ‘safety,’ ‘exploitation,’ ‘war’.”

One afternoon on the street, I heard unholy screams and saw that two men outside a house had a pig lassoed by the neck. The animal was crying frantically…one man grabbed the doomed pig’s legs and flipped it on its back, and the other, flashing metal, leaned down, and the cries grew more terrified…In my room, I couldn’t stop crying. You’re a spoiled American, I thought. What do you think you’ve been eating all these years? Lovingly culled meat ‘products’? Happy cows? Happy pigs? ‘I’ve never seen anything being killed before. Never,’ I said out loud, which brought the next thought. ‘Oh God, those people.’”

“Do I eat meat, a boy, looking slightly green, wants to know. When I see how you sign that one—head decapitation—I do the sensible thing. I lie and say no.”

“The cows were tied together with thick ropes, and dragged around by their owners, their teats and mouths and vaginas examined by potential buyers.”

“He had sold the cows to a trader who shipped them to Kuwait, where they were slaughtered and eaten. Now there was no need to ship cows to slaughterhouses in the Gulf, he said; plenty of people in India ate beef—young people, city dwellers, even villagers.”

“Ramadas was a Dalit—a member of the “untouchable” caste—and, as I got to know him, I realized that his atheism had been shaped by the discrimination he had suffered and seen all his life.”

“Even as the number of millionaires and billionaires has increased, followed by the aspirers from the middle classes, the poor have seen either little or no improvement at all…In 2004-5, the last year for which data was available, the total number of people in India consuming less than 20 rupees (or 50 cents) a day was 836 million—or 77 per cent of the population.”

“Even though the expansion of India’s middle class has encouraged Indian and multinational enterprises to cater to their aspirations through an expanded array of consumer goods, luxury housing, shopping malls, and even fast-food outlets, poverty, low levels of human development, and hunger remain widespread.”

“‘No, no,’ the people around me cried out. ‘It’s for the bhains, cattle and for chicken.’…’It makes them fat, makes them produce more milk, more eggs, more meat, so that people in the cities can eat them and get bigger.’”

“The harassment moved easily along the bottom half of the class ladder, targeting semi-literate women who worked as maidservants as well as the more educated ones with jobs at restaurants…It was the sudden explosion of malls and restaurants that had created jobs like the ones at Pizza Hut where men and women worked together; it had drawn thousands of women from the north-east, pried for their English and their lighter skin it had also stoked the confused desires of men from deeply patriarchal cultures.”