Among the challenges – let’s not call them problems – that strong economic growth brings with it, features public cleansing. Waste is increasing at a rate which might be greater than that of consumption, which in turn could be growing at a higher rate than that of economic growth. The refuse that is being produced cannot all be cleared as soon as it emerges.

To an outside observer, the impression prevails that there is no central focus covering how such waste should be treated. Domestic waste is what seems to get processed according to a well established procedure, though too often its management seems like it is split into too many small fiefdoms.

So that then, in public places where tourist activity builds up, or at village festas and commercial binges, cleansing remains deficient. A sense of discipline by the public at large is almost non existent.

To be fair, in recent years, there has been an enormous improvement in the ways by which cleansing is carried out in the wake of mass activities, like political mass meetings or pop music concerts. Still in all this, something remains missing...

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Inequality

The irony is that while in a few years, the huge prejudices against citizens of the LGTB community were overcome and full equality of social rights for them was justifiably introduced, by contrast the good intentions to overcome the disadvantages of a majority of the population have remained a dead letter. Indeed there has been a setback in reaching the goal of easing the participation of this majority in mainstream decision-making.

It is true that women in this country have achieved full access to the educational system and are participating in it to a greater extent than men. However when and where political and economic matters are being decided, women still find themselves in a minority, which is shocking.

I still believe that this inequality can only be reversed by measures that implement a positive discrimination, meaning quotas. That’s what the experience of other countries indicates.

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The Moonstone

As I discovered recently, there is a certain pleasure in returning to books you would have read a long time ago to sample them again. This is what I did with the Wilkie Collins’ novel “The Moonstone” which made a sensation when it first appeared in the nineteenth century. Some critics consider it to the the first “modern” detective novel though one would think that this is an exagerration. The descriptor, if it makes sense, would better fit other books.

Even so, Collins succeeds in arousing curiosity and interest in the story he proposes even if it may feel too complicated and farfetched by today’s standards. What is saidin a thousandwordscouldprobably have been done in four hundred.

But the atmospherics he builds up, the tension he creates between characters, the comical or farcical sidelines, indeed the novel’s melodramatic architecture remain fascinating. When one has read it as an adolescent and now still finds it interesting, reflections about the value of literature, or of art for that matter, inevitably follow.

What is it that makes literature so effective across countries, ages, generations, centuries?