'What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning?' Combining brilliant insight and razor-sharp prose, ''Listening to Grasshoppers'' is Arundhati Roy's essential exploration of the political picture in India today. In these essays, she takes a hard look at the underbelly of the world's largest democracy and shows how the journey that Hindu nationalism and neo-liberal economic reforms began together in the early 1990s is unravelling in dangerous ways. Beginning with the state-backed killing of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, and ending with an analysis of the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai, ''Listening to Grasshoppers'' tracks the fault-lines that threaten to destroy India's precarious future and, along the way, asks fundamental questions about democracy itself - a political system that has, by virtue of being considered 'the best available option', been put beyond doubt and correction.