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.
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.
As might be expected of someone who was married to Joe Slovo and once ran the Land Bank, editor of Team Coaching Helena Dolny is intimately familiar with the world of SA politics. She has just spoken out against SA’s seemingly ever-lengthening gravy train at the commemoration of the fifteenth anniversary of her husband’s death:
“As much as Joe liked the good life he didn’t change his old car when he became minister. He would have been distraught if he read the papers today,” she said.
Dolny was speaking at the 15 year commemoration of Joe Slovo’s death at Avalon cemetery in Soweto, Johannesburg.
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.
Here’s a terrific feature on Eastwood’s latest from Zane Henry, writing in IOL Tonight, that includes a review, a summary of Eastwood’s role in getting the film off the ground, and a video interview with Morgan Freeman:
Two questions can be asked of Invictus. Should it have been made? And, could it have been made better? Well, yes and no, respectively.
The film tells a cracking good story with absorbing, if rather gentle, narrative developments. It is entertaining and, yes, inspiring.
The 1995 World Cup is an event most South Africans will remember with fondness. The film, and John Carlin’s book Playing The Enemy initially, throw some light on exactly why it is so memorable. It charts Nelson Mandela’s first few years out of prison and in the presidency and how he visualised using the World Cup to unite a divided land.
If it wasn’t for Clint Eastwood, the film might never have been made. Such is his Hollywood cachet that he could get a film about rugby and politics greenlit.
The Clint Eastwood-directed film of John Carlin’s book Invictus (originally titled Playing the Enemy) premiered in Beverly Hills, California earlier this week. Guests included Angelina Jolie and Francois Pienaar, and the photos have appeared online. Feast your eyes!
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”.
To celebrate the film release of 
