gulp!

...the irony was inescapable...the guy reading over my shoulders let a smile slip...there i was on the train back home reading p sainath's article on water privatisation in the latest frontline, clutching onto this chilled bottle of "mac blue" packaged drinking water!!

scary!...however much you may read about it, however closer we may inch towards a crisis, it still seems incomprehensible...overwhelming! they've sold a river in chattisgarh! (price of seperating from MP?) ... water sold to companies who default a Rs12/kilolitre payment and get bailed out by the courts at Rs6 a kilolitre!!

what next? the next monsoons perhaps?!...

i was in goa researching for a film on the effects of mining in the interior villages...the iron ore mines are almost exhausted now...the
5-6 families who until now controlled goa's land and industry, now sit pretty plump over the huge reservoirs of water that their mines gorged out...out of surrounding village wells n rivulets. they've now entered into jv's with coke, pepsi, kingfisher...

the image that stayed in my mind of that trip was of this mining company tanker supplying water to the very people (queueing up)whose wells have run dry thanks to the mining...getting fucked twice over...first, their land rendered useless due to mining silt wash-off and now...

"..to those who have more shall be given, and those who have not, the little that they have shall be taken away"...or so says the bible.