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March 6, 2004
Window seats on bullet trains
When you think you're well travelled, killing a few seconds on this rather funky map generator can do a very good job of showing just how, well, Western your airport-hopping has been. See how my journey is like a big red diagonal line through all the easy parts of the world? Except of course for hopping over that scary middle bit (there may have been an airport here and there but I decided not to count those). The website said I had visited 8% of the world's countries. Next on my list is Sealand. I always wanted to live on an oil-rig.
For somebody who has grown up with the stench of oil dripping from filthy laundry, surrounded by roustabouts and crane operators (otherwise known as family), I've spent surprisingly little time on rigs. When I was young, I used to visit my dad on his rig when it would come in to dock for repairs. They are such awesome constructions. Mostly I remember giant burgers in the cafeteria and soft-serve ice cream from burly chefs with tattoos, but also there were the snaking metal corridors of the living quarters, all rivets and drab paint. Piping running in every direction, cranes swinging all around. A control room full of radio gear and machines making eight different kinds of 'bing!'. I wonder if the residents of Sealand live on giant burgers and soft-serve ice cream. One thing that would suck is you couldn't watch DVDs -- they all seem to explicitly forbid viewing on oil rigs. Perhaps they worry that a few soft-focus sex scenes might excite a vessel-load of frisky workermen a little too much and they'll not notice a gas pipe that hasn't been sealed properly.
Speaking of another red country on my little map there, Franny Armstrong's Drowned Out (the story of the Sardar Sarovar dam project) is on SBS on Tuesday night, renamed as The Dammed. It is an utterly horrid, rivetting documentary that caused me to rethink much of what I held as important in my own work. And, along with Arundhati Roy's The Algebra of Infinite Justice, caused me to rethink much of what I hoped was true of India -- a country where I first set foot, funnily enough, because of their burgeoning need for oil and desire to sell their soul to multinational industrial giants. My dad worked for one of them.
In conjunction with the increasing trend for handing over state-owned water facilities to private companies (in what a Mother Jones article claims is a US$200 billiion a year business), water is shaping up to be the next battleground for corporate justice and human rights. Fortune called it the oil of the 21st century. Like oil, the big players are already in place (Suez, Vivendi, RWE/Thames Water and Bechtel), and the riots and deaths in South American countries are now matter-of-fact.
I've been fascinated by the confluence of things in the story of the Narmada -- spirituality, indigenous land rights, fascist nationalism, corporate rape, and a chain of tragedy that leads from the inner sanctums of the World Bank to the villages of Jalsindhi where the Adivasi people stand, the water to their waists, asking their river why it has forsaken them. Wondering where the gods go when the trees they've lived in are now six feet below the surface. Somewhere in there is the PhD I'm actually going to write. It's about water, and how its politics and spirituality shape culture so fundamentally. The dams, the Indian bureaucrats say, are the temples of modern India. The gods that are worshipped there are the new ones, the useful ones, the ones that have no truck with aspecting as elephants and would much rather wear a fetching pair of Patrick Cox loafers and travel around on a Segway. They've actually been around for a long time, those gods, we've just given them new names and allowed them to keep coming back, under the illusion of Progress. But those temples that worship them spread beyond India, and the dam craze continues to spread throughout the IMF's pet countries.
Posted by patrick at March 6, 2004 10:13 AM
Comments
I haven't seen The Damned but I can certainly attest to the power of Arundhati Roy's writing to change a person's mind. Or perhaps it's that she has made me think about things I was trying hard not to.
Posted by: Lisa at March 16, 2004 5:50 PM
