The greatest challenge faced by protestors seeking a better future is not eviction – but the assertion that they have mapped no alternative.
How will their aims be achieved?
Unless they offer more, their efforts will fade into oblivion.
Comments during or after a video made at St Paul’s by Citywire Money:
“No intellectual coherence, vague, aims and objectives are yet to be defined.”
Similarly in 2004, the verdict in the press on the World Social Forum in Mumbai
- Student Andre Fernandes attending the Forum: The speeches are very vague, there are still no alternative or concrete solutions given.
- Bill Clinton, from the World Economic Forum in Davos, they are mourning for a past that never existed.
- Gurcharan Das, attending the Forum: this kumbh mela of do-gooders was also the world’s largest gathering of misguided and bewildered souls ever assembled
- Anjali Doshi reporting on the Forum: Practical alternatives remain elusive as unfocused passions define dreams of an equal world . . . But how can a new world order be built on an edifice of confusion?*
Satish Kumar of Schumacher College, in Mumbai a month earlier, said:
“Problems are convergent so solutions must also be convergent. If I do land reform, you do education, someone else does solar energy, we lose out. If we work together holistically, we will all be more effective.”
