A NOVEL PROTEST AGAINST GLOBALISATION 59 Where we stand, there wayward market Has fattened us. Thanks to total grief and pain, We are nurturing despair in the name of market We have even granted a massive rebate On our sins and crimes^ This sensitive despair turns into full throated accusation in the last published essay, his Nobel Lecture delivered in 1999. Addressing that august assembly in Stockholm, Grass said, "We look on in horror as capitalism rages unimpeded, megalomaniacally ...It has turned the free market into dogma, the only truth and intoxicated by its all but limitless power, plays the wildest of games, making merger after merger with no goal other than to maximize profits. Globalisation is its motto, a motto it proclaims with the arrogance of infallibility ... Only hunger seems to resist. It is even increasing. The poor counter growing riches with growing birth rates. The affluent north and west can try to screen themselves off in security-mad fortresses, but the flocks of refugees will catch up with them: no gate can withstand the crush of the hungry".33 This prediction, in one intense sweep, posits the counter-paradigm of a brilliant creative writer. It elevates the theory-and-discourse-in-opposition to the level of an adamant vision and speaks of a frontier-less world, inherently human and redemptive. NOTES 1. The Call of the Toad. Translated from the German by Ralph Mannheim (Seeker and Warburg, London, 1991) Page 9 and Page 17 2. Ibid, Page 28 3. Ibid, Page 27 4. Ibid, Pagesl45-146 5. Ibid, Page 160 6. Ibid, Page 160 7. Ibid,P^ell7 8. Ibid, Page 172 9. Ibid, Page 178 10. Ibid, Page 204 11. Dialogues with Four Nobel Laureates (Dasgupta and Co. Kolkata, 2001 )Page 12. 12. Amiya Bagchi's essay 'Globalisation, Liberalisation and Vulnerability - India and Third World5 {Economic and Political Weekly, November 6,1999). Page 3219. 13. The Call of The Toad, Page 41