Since denying, some weeks ago, that he was the Maitreya – another word for “Messiah” – Raj Patel has been unable to quite shake the story foisted upon him by obscure religious group Share International.
But the activist-author is taking it in his stride, and recently returned to the US comedy show The Colbert Report – his earlier appearance on the show being the unintentional source of his deification – to make light of all the fuss. Watch Stephen Colbert speak to Raj Patel:
On a more serious note, Patel has been blogging about his book, The Value of Nothing, and we’ve found a post that all can relate to. Do you really know the value of things? For example, how much would a housewife earn, were she paid for her daily work? What is the true cost of fish fingers? Patel takes a look at how much ten universally-consumed items really cost us:
#10 Bottled Water – Bottled water sounds like it should be cheaper – it’s 200 to 10,000 times more expensive than tap water. But in the US, the annual energy wasted on bottled water adds the equivalent to 100,000 cars on roads and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. And the price we pay for water doesn’t begin to address the longer term issues of global shortage for something that everyone needs to survive. Make a start: stop your local government from wasting your money on bottled water, as we did in San Francisco.
#9 Cellphones – We’ve all got them. The trouble is that one of the minerals inside our high tech toys – coltan – is bought very dear indeed. With around three quarters of the world’s reserves of coltan in the Democratic Republic of Congo, our demand for gadgets fuels bloody conflict and vast human suffering. The No Blood on My Cellphone campaign shows how we can stop it.
#8 Double cheeseburger – A value meal is a great way to eat if you’ve neither time nor money but this cheap food turns out to be ‘cheat food’. What if we had to pay the full environmental, labour and health costs of a burger? Some researchers think we’d end up paying over $200, and that doesn’t include the modern day slavery in our North American sandwiches.
Economist and author, Raj Patel, looks at the world differently to you and I. He digs below the surface to discover how much the things we eat, drink, wear and keep really cost us. The Value of Nothing succeeds previous works by Patel such as Stuffed and Starved.
Readers who aren’t familiar with your work will want to know what qualifies you to write such an ambitious book. Can you tell us a little about your background?
I was born in London from parents born in Kenya and Fiji and with ancestors in India. My family have been living globalisation from way back when it was called imperialism. I’ve studied mathematics, philosophy, economics, and sociology, with some of the best teachers in the UK and United States but actually none of this qualified me to write a book about how we might value our world differently. I’ve learned most of the ideas and insights that propelled this book forward from being an activist, and being lucky enough to meet and learn from ordinary people in social movements in South Africa, Mexico, India, Brazil and right here in North America. And even then, I don’t think I’ve got all the answers. What I’ve managed to do is pick up more good questions, though, and seen how people in different democratic experiments have created ways to learn from their mistakes.
Strange things have happened and stranger will happen still but, no-one can deny that author Raj Patel has certainly had an odd few weeks of late. After the hugely successful debut of his new book, The Value of Nothing, some in India have started calling him “Maitreya” – aka, the Messiah! Alison Flood chatted to Patel about his book and his newfound, erm, divine status:
Im not averse to a sneaky bit of author-worship: sobbing quietly to myself as I make my way around the Keats-Shelley house in Rome, pilgrimaging to Hampstead to see where my hero fell in love with Fanny Brawne. I might spend time digging around the internet to make sure Ive read everything Mary Stewart has ever written, and seen every interview shes ever done. But even I have never gone so far as to deify any of my literarycrushes.Raj Patel, author of the recent The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy,never expected it to happen to him either. He was first bemused and then astounded at the flood of emails hes been receiving in the last few weeks, asking him whether he is Maitreya – the Messiah by any other name – a leader who will “inspire humanity to see itself as one family, and create a civilisation based on sharing, economic and social justice, and global cooperation”. Some believers even flew from Detroit to San Francisco to see him doing a book reading.
By freeing Mandela, Carlin writes, de Klerk helped South Africa take a first step into becoming a place where “respect has replaced hatred”. He was at Mandela’s first post-imprisonment press conference:
FW de Klerk, South Africa’s last white president, stunned the world on 2 February 1990 when he announced the lifting of the ban on the African National Congress, after three decades of illegality, and the imminent release of its leader, Nelson Mandela, after more than 27 years in prison. Black South Africans reacted with joyful stupefaction; white South Africans, programmed to view Mandela as the vengeful terrorist who would thrown them all into the sea, were in shock, none more so than the parliamentary caucus of the far right Conservative party.
The caucus held an emergency meeting at which their leader, Andries Treurnicht, better known as “Dr No”, read a thunderous passage from the Old Testament, preparing his co-religionists for holy war. A conservative MP there recalled later that they had long been fearing the day might come when they would have to unleash “the Afrikaner tiger”. “And, well,” the MP said, “this was the tiger moment.”
Nine days later, Mandela was out and the next morning he gave a press conference which I attended in the garden of Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Cape Town home. If Mandela had ever been a “terrorist” – he was jailed for founding and leading the armed wing of the ANC – he did not look much like one now. A fit, good-humoured, serene and kingly figure aged 71, he committed himself to finding a negotiated solution to a conflict that had been threatening during the violent Eighties to spill over into civil war.
Toe John Carlin begin skryf het aan Invictus het hy nooit kon raai watter opskudding die boek, en die fliek wat daarop gebasseer is, sou maak nie. Sarie het bietjie by die outeur gaan uitvind hoe hy voel oor sy sukses, die film en sy toekomsplanne.
Het jy ooit gedink die boek sal soveel impak hê?
Nooit! Alles – die boek se sukses en, veral die maak van die fliek – is ‘n massiewe bevredigende verrassing.
Volg jy steeds die politiek in SA?
Ja. Met ywerige belangstelling. Ek stel meer belang in SA politiek as enige ander land se politiek; ek is ook meer geïnteresseerd in SA as enige ander land.
The film Invictus is taking audiences, both locally and abroad, by storm, with its brilliantly-directed tale of a special moment in South African history. Based on John Carlin’s book, the narrative incorporates William Henley’s famous poem, which obviously supplied the title. British journalist Ian Jack takes a closer look at “Invictus” the poem, the man behind it and the men who have embraced its message:
Invictus, meaning unconquered, is the name of Clint Eastwood’s new film about Nelson Mandela and the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa that was won by the Springboks; a victory celebrated by black people as well as white and generally recognised as the country’s first important symbol of national unification. Eastwood directs, Morgan Freeman is Mandela, Matt Damon plays the Springboks’ captain, Francois Pienaar. At their first meeting, when success on the field is still far from certain, the president tells the captain of a favourite poem that inspired him during his 18 years of imprisonment on Robben Island. The poem is Invictus by WE (William Ernest) Henley, which had helped him “stand up when all I wanted to do was lie down”.
Oscar Wilde famously said that “the cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”.
A person from the future beamed back to his time might have retorted with another famous quote: “Oscar, you ain’t seen nothing yet!”
Ours is an age, as Raj Patel argues in his new book on consumer activism, The Value of Nothing, of tospy-turvy values, where a Big Mac that costs R20 should actually cost R1500, where all consumers are unwitting cynics, knowing, to the cent, how much they pay for their lifestyles, but not how much it actually costs.
Patel was a guest on the US’s wildly popular comedy talk show The Colbert Report this week, where he was the object of host Stephen Colbert’s mock scorn for trying to change the world. Enjoy this slice of humour with a message:
Credit has crunched, debt has turned toxic, the gears of the world economy have ground to a halt. It’s now clear that the market doesn’t only get it wrong about sub-prime mortgages, it gets it wrong about everything. We need to ask again one of the most fundamental questions a society ever addresses, and one to which very few people know or understand the answer: Why do things cost what they do?
Radical, original, nimbly argued, The Value of Nothing uses some fundamental but forgotten economics and some cutting-edge neuroeconomics to show how the price we pay for everything from food, to handbags, to fridges, to entertainment, is systematically distorted. After reading this book, the question ‘How much?’ should never just be about the price on the sticker.
Around 500 youngsters from disadvantaged communities were treated to a free screening of the movie Invictus at Maponya Mall in Soweto on Wednesday night, as part of a special Reconciliation Day commemoration.
Morgan Freeman, who plays former president Nelson Mandela in the movie, personally welcomed the audiences and helped hand over money raised for three charities as part of the Invictus Fund.
Journalist Alexandra Zavis covered the 1995 Rugby World Cup, as part of her wider reporting on South Africa’s transition to democracy. She remembers “the moment” in the final match that John Carlin’s book and Clint Eastwood’s film capture so powerfully – and she also provides 15 years’ worth of post-match analysis:
But with that one gesture, Mandela reassured the sport’s largely white fans, many of whom had thought of him as a terrorist, that they too had a place in the new South Africa. A chant rose from the stands, difficult to make out at first, then filling the stadium: “Nelson. Nelson. Nelson.”
Of all the improbable images I carry in my head from covering those first heady days of South Africa’s new democracy for the Associated Press, this one stands out. The film “Invictus,” directed by Clint Eastwood and based on a book by journalist John Carlin called “Playing the Enemy,” captures this extraordinary moment when history really was made on a sports field.
Meanwhile, The New Yorker magazine has called Invictus “the best sports movie of the year”, and offers two readings of the film that mix the past with the present.
The first takes a closer look at New Zealand’s haka…
One of the many great moments in Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus”—and, for someone not versed in the ways of rugby, one of the more unexpected—comes in the final of the 1995 World Cup, when the South African Springboks and New Zealand All Blacks have lined up in the field and the New Zealanders start stomping and chanting in unison, turning the South African players even paler than they (or all but one of them) already are. This is the Haka, a Maori war dance now used to intimidate New Zealand’s sporting opponents.
…while the second wonders aloud whether the Obama administration can take any lessons from the film about truth and reconciliation:
Mandela announced his proposal for the T.R.C. four days after the Springboks won the world cup. Given what a pivotal moment the victory was, those events can’t be entirely unrelated—had the Afrikaner sports fans we see, in the movie, painting their chests green and gold even sobered up four days later? Some glimpse of the discussion that preceded the T.R.C. might have made a good film even better. But then there are a couple of specters in the film, and there is a tension between them. One is the reality of apartheid—the pass laws, the brutality, the lack of even a pretense of rights. That one is, arguably, incompletely evoked; an American moviegoer who knew nothing might assume that apartheid-era South Africa was sort of like, say, Mississippi in the sixties (which would be bad enough), with a bit more poverty and stranger accents. And then there’s the specter of Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe became the sort of dictator Mandela might have become if he weren’t better than that—better than most of us.
The Clint Eastwood-directed adaptation of John Carlin’s Invictus (originally titled Playing the Enemy) opened around the world this weekend. As might be expected, media coverage of the story of South Africa’s fabled 1995 Rugby World Cup win – and the crucial role that Nelson Mandela played behind the scenes – has been intense.
Morgan Freeman was in South Africa to attend the local premiere, and the Sunday Times snapped up an interview with him. Here’s his chat with Biénne Huisman; and a podcast in which he answers the question, “Were you intimidated, playing Nelson Mandela?”
“Oh my, isn’t it lovely,” he drawled, while brandishing pictures of the seven-seater jet. The SB30 is the flagship aircraft of Emivest Aerospace, and is marketed as “the world’s fastest, longest-range and highest-flying light jet”.
Freeman, who got his pilot’s licence in 2002, flew the aircraft to South Africa last week, and plans to touch down in Botswana and Kenya next.
He said he inherited a Madiba shirt from the Invictus film shoot and intends to wear it in his home town of Charleston, Mississippi.
Podcast: Morgan Freeman answers the SA press’ questions
At the same time, the film has returned many local rugby heroes to the limelight – including Joel Stransky, who kicked the winning drop goal against New Zealand in the world cup’s final match. Aspasia Karras caught up with him:
I am having a surreal moment. Francois Pienaar – or rather Matt Damon channelling Francois Pienaar – is staring directly into the cinema audience and telling Joel Stransky to go home. Sitting directly behind me is Joel Stransky; fortunately he does not obey.
We are watching Invictus – Clint Eastwood’s interpretation of John Carlin’s book about the 1995 Rugby World Cup – and things have taken a decidedly peculiar turn. Will the real Joel Stransky please stand up?
Given that he is one of my all-time favourite Bokke and having the distinction of touring with him (we went to Paris to witness our team’s second World Cup) I naturally want the lowdown from the man himself. How does it feel to be immortalised on celluloid?
Since denying, some weeks ago, that he was the Maitreya – another word for “Messiah” – Raj Patel has been unable to quite shake the story foisted upon him by obscure religious group Share International.
Economist and author, Raj Patel, looks at the world differently to you and I. He digs below the surface to discover how much the things we eat, drink, wear and keep really cost us. 
Oscar Wilde famously said that “the cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”.
