World facing radical uncertainty: Amitav Ghosh
Renowned author and recipient of Jnanpith Award Amitav Ghosh on Tuesday said the world was facing radical uncertainty as it witnessed a head-on collision between two contradictory historical impulses — imperial paramountcy and decolonisation.
“The first dynamic allowed a tiny minority of the world population to siphon off a hugely disproportionate share of the earth’s endowments at the expense of the majority, including often many of their own citizens. The second, countervailing, impulse has now led to an enormous expansion in the economies of the Global South, though also often at the expense of many of their own people,” Ghosh said.
“This is what makes this a time of such a radical uncertainty,” Ghosh said, while delivering the Renowned Dr CD Deshmukh Memorial Lecture 2025 on “Time of Monsters, Time of Possibilities: Reflections on an Interstitial Era” at the India International Centre (IIC) here.
Moderated by IIC president Shyam Saran, the event was attended by many prominent personalities, including former Governor of Jammu and Kashmir NN Vohra.
Quoting American strategist George Kennan, Ghosh said, “The fundamental challenge that now confronts the US, and indeed the collective West, is that of preserving their hold on a vastly disproportionate share of the world’s wealth.”
He said what made this disparity possible was the enormous gap in military tactics and technology that opened up between the imperial core and the periphery over centuries of colonisation.
“Today, even though the West is responsible for 75 per cent of the world’s military spending, this gap is closing fast, and in many respects it has already closed. Now even an impoverished country like Yeman can disrupt global trade with a few homemade missiles,” Ghosh pointed out.
Noting that the leadership of the collective West was pursuing the “fundamentally unachievable goal of maintaining its hold on a vastly disproportionate share of the world’s resources”, he said, “Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that the goal will not be abandoned, and if it should prove to be the case that the only means of preserving the West’s historic advantage is by sowing chaos throughout the world, then so be it.”
Ghosh said, “It is not hard to predict, however, that ultimately this chaos will return to haunt the West, as it has already repeatedly done since the start of this millennium.”
