Swami Shivanand of the Matri Sadan ashram in Haridwar, India, breaks a 36-day fast to protect the Ganges River.
Details to come. I first wrote about Shivanand and his band of dedicated and embattled saints last December for National Geographic ( http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2011/12/09/a-swamis-hunger-strike-ends-mining-on-a-stretch-of-the-ganges-river/ ) and the New York Times ( http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/a-sacred-river-under-assault/ — http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/21/indias-anticorruption-guru-anna-hazare-is-a-hunger-strike-opportunist/ ).
Shivanand is fearless, and says he’s not afraid of death. Just the same, I am very glad he’s alive.
An estimated
600 million Indians * – more people than live in western Europe — were without electricity earlier this week, victims of a massive blackout that darkened most of the northern and eastern portions of the country.
The Great Indian Outage, stretching from New Delhi to Kolkata, comes just a day after 300 million people in northern India lost power for much of Monday.
It is a disaster that’s caused untold damage to India’s economy, its prestige, and its well-being – think of the millions of patients in hospitals, the commuters stuck on trains, and farmers in need of irrigation. Hundreds of miners in the states of West Bengal and Jharkand were trapped underground by the blackout. Some 300 trains were reportedly stalled across the country.
There’s more damage to come, I fear: Forces that have been bridling against environmental regulations and science-based activism will use the Great Outage as a cudgel to demolish future restraints on dam construction, coal mining, and other projects.
India’s humiliating power failure is sure to birth a slogan as reductive and wrong as America’s own “Drill Baby Drill.” Continue reading »
Two new pieces at the New York Times/International Herald Tribune: A River Runs Through It weighs the odds of a $40 billion cleanup of the Ganges River. The Gandhian Knot looks at the use and misuse of Gandhi’s name and image — and the takeover of a Gandhian institution by right-wingers.
Two recent pieces for the New York Times/International Herald Tribune‘s Latitude blog:
India’s Political Blasphemy, on the Salman Rushdie affair earlier this month at the Jaipur Literary Festival.
Come Hell With High Water, on Bangladesh’s approach to global climate change.
Next up: India’s gangster parliamentarians.
A version of this post first appeared at National Geographic, and references my piece, Grunge on the Ganges, at The New York Times’ Latitude blog.
Varanasi, India — A couple years ago, one of India’s leading industrial houses announced a revolutionary new household filter that would for the first time bring affordable, safe drinking water to millions of homes. The Tata Swach combines the inexpensive carbon of burnt rice husks with silver nano-particles to kill and remove deadly microbes including cholera, E coli, and the rotavirus.
The Swach doesn’t need electricity or running water. Unlike some filters sold in the United States, the Swatch’s filter bulb cuts off the flow of water when it’s exhausted, meaning it’s impossible to drink unclean water that’s passed through a spent filter. (There’s no risk in drinking unfiltered water in New York or Denver, but it’s a different story in India, where waterborne diseases kill as many as half a million children each year.)
And it’s hugely affordable: The unit costs less than $20 and monthly filter replacements are just $7.
More than a million of these filters have been sold since 2009, and it’s not hard to imagine the public health benefits that will follow. More Indian companies are jumping into the low-cost filter business, which could push prices even lower.
This Indian success story, however, can also be seen as a thin bit of cover for the country’s scandalously poor public services. Continue reading »
Three sacred rivers meet at Allahabad: The Ganges, born of clear Himalayan tributaries that first trickle and then rage down from India’s border with Tibet; its sister, the Yamuna, which shadows the Ganges to the west before curving past Delhi and the Taj Mahal to join her; and the mythical Saraswati, ancient and invisible, which is said to run beneath the earth.
Only the Saraswati reaches Allahabad in a pristine state.
My latest, at National Geographic.
The forests of Bangladesh are dwindling by the day, creating a furry refugee crisis among forest-dwelling animals who are forced into towns and villages in search of food.
That’s where Sitesh Ranjan Deb comes in. The subject of my most recent piece for Nat Geo News Watch, Sitesh is a one man International Rescue Committee waging a lonely battle to save the animals of his native land. I think you’ll enjoy this tale of a gunman turned conservationist.
(Looking for news of The Black Nile? Check out this review by Issandr el Amrani in The National, and this exclusive excerpt from The Faster Times. )
Please check out this great review by Hugh Pope in the weekend Wall Street Journal. Here’s the kicker:
Above all, Mr. Morrison’s peppery anecdotes, his refreshing honesty and his ability to show how Africans view their difficulties save “The Black Nile” from being simply a memoir of an author’s self-prescribed endurance test. Instead, the book gives us a compelling portrait of life along the Nile—from lonely fishing communities on Lake Victoria to the cacophonous collisions of Cairo. Mr. Morrison’s more discouraging encounters also quietly pay tribute to triumphs of the human spirit. Mr. Bryan, the author’s companion and verbal sparring partner for the first third of the account, later writes to him: “It’s good to be desperate once in a while. Gives you an appreciation of the looks on people’s faces when they’re desperate and you’re not.”
My newest piece, on the struggle for control of the Nile. Here’s the lead:
I was standing inside a colonial-era circuit house in a sprawling, malarial city called Malakal in southern Sudan. I had come to see a man about a river, but the man, an Egyptian hydrologist, wasn’t talking.
“It is forbidden,” he said solemnly, “to speak of the Nile.”
I pointed towards the window. “But it’s right there,” I said. This was, after all, a measuring station of the Egyptian water ministry, one of several it maintained in Sudan and Uganda to track the volume of the world’s longest river.
The hydrologist didn’t need to look out the window. He knew where the Nile was–he’d devoted his life to its study. But there was nothing he could say to a stranger about something so important to his nation’s survival. I might have had better luck inquiring about Tehran’s nuclear program.
You can read the whole article here, and check out other great writing on the environment at the NatGeo News Watch blog.
The world’s cheapest car makes an impressive bonfire. Continue reading »
