India Books

Wonderful social commentary great for children and adults. I would also recommend 'In the Land of Hattamala' if you can find it.

Despite the fact that there are now 279 English translations of the 'Bhagavad Gita' in existence, Alan Jacob's own recently pubished edition is one of the most beautiful. A transcreation rather than a translation, the author has endeavoured to preserve the essence of the nondualist teachings (also known as Advaita Vedanta) interwoven in Hinduism's best known spiritual text as well as introduce his own poetic touch.

Literally meaning the 'Song of God', the 'Bhagavad Gita' recounts a key moment in the ancient Indian epic, the 'Mahabharata'. Set on the battlefield of Kurashetra between two rival royal households, Arjuna, leader of the Pandavas, is rendered impotent in the face of impending bloodshed. Krishna, Avatar and Arjuna's charioteer, thus takes the opportunity to deliver the Dharma or moral code. Indeed, the battle can be interpreted as an allegory of the inner warfare between dharma (harmony) and adharma (discord) within in all of us in the face of life's challenges and troubles.

Together with his 'Principal Upanishads', the profundity of this particular edition of the 'Bhagavad Gita' is owing to the author's accessible and yet exquisite poetry:

This epic Mahabharata
Is a bright blue water lily
Her Gita is the precious pollen;
Sipping as a humble bumble bee,
Relish her sweet nectar
And bathe yourself in her
Honey of Wisdom

Interspersed between the verses, the author offers interpretations of the text as well as cross references to other sages and writers of great wisdom. Jesus, Plato, Shakespeare and Schopenhauer amongst others reiterate the nondualist message - that ultimately, all is the Divine, all is One:

Why Arjuna should I reveal this!
It is enough to know
That upholding this Creation
With a piece
Of My Self, Consciousness,
Peace, Awreness,
I am That, I am.

J.A.B. van Buitenen's translation has an illuminating clarity and is excellent for a first time read, especially for readers with a western background. The transliteration is on the left-page side and the English on the right. There is also an indepth scholarly introduction and many useful footnotes.

The author, Swami Muktananda, was a great yogic master renowned for his ability to awaken the Kundalini in seekers, thereby enabling them to embark on the journey towards God realization. He established Siddha Yoga in the West at the behest of his Guru, Bhagawan Nityananda of Ganeshpuri. In this lively work, Swami Muktananda recounts the life of his Guru, a saint who attained God realization and who unceasingly worked to help others achieve the same goal. It is a story filled with miracles, love, devotion to God, the power of Siddha Yoga, and in particular the author's expressions of indebtedness to the man who made him what he was. This reader is left deeply moved.

This book is one of my most well-loved non-fiction books. It is written by a woman who both understands the dance and is able to explain it to outsiders. I got this book when I was just starting to learn dance, and it's given me an invaluable perspective on the origins and meaning of Bharata Natyam. The ancient history of temple dance is fairly small, but the 19th and 20th century information is both copious and vivid. She also does a great job in explaining the components of a formal recital, and other parts of the dance form.

This book contained some of the inner thoughts of India I never knew about. My parents are from India and I,myself,have been to India a few times.The way the girl grew up is unreadable. This book is so good that words can not express my feelings. The way she grew up and worked herself up to her goal, which was to reach America. That was her goal and her destination. That is what I felt about this book.

"There is very little to eat. Very little to wear. Papa just doesn't get a job. He has no permanent job. Before the leak, he used to work on a boring machine. Now he cannot work on that machine.

"Carbide must be punished. Take them to the police station. Then hit them and then jail them--those Carbide fellows. I can't play. I am weak. My hands and legs ache when I run. I get breathless soon. If I run I fall down immediately."

So said Suresh, an eight-year old student from the city of Bhopal, India, in the aftermath of the December 2-3, 1984 leakage of 80,000 pounds of methyl isocyanate (MIC, an ingredient of the pesticide Sevin) from the Union Carbide plant that killed up to 10,000 overnight. Children have an uncanny sense of truth-telling.

So, too, does the Bhopal Reader, a remarkable and devastating compendium of primary and secondary sources on the disaster. It reprints the charge sheet, arrest warrant, and bail bond for then-Carbide Chair Warren Anderson. Although he was indeed taken to a police station, he was not jailed, and both Mr. Anderson and Union Carbide have been pronounced "absconders" by Indian courts for failing to this day to appear to face charges of culpable homicide, the equivalent of manslaughter in the US. "Those Carbide fellows" have never fully faced the consequences for their role in the disaster, while Suresh (if she survived) and her fellow Bhopal residents live every day with the consequences, which include contaminated water and soil and inadequate medical attention.

The book brings the issue very close to the present, as it also reprints the January 6, 2005 order from the Bhopal Chief Judicial Magistrate asking Dow Chemical (ticker: DOW), which acquired Union Carbide in 2001, to present the absconders. Ward Morehouse, one of the book's editors, is asking Dow the same question today at its annual meeting, appearing as a representative of socially responsible investment (SRI) firm Boston Common Asset Management to read a letter that the company has failed to respond to before now.

The book touches on shareholder activism as the latest in 20 years of activism asking Union Carbide to assume accountability for the disaster. Boston Common submitted a shareholder resolution asking Dow to address the legacy of the Bhopal disaster last year. When it did so again this year, Dow petitioned the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for permission to omit the resolution on technical grounds, according to Lauren Compere, chief administrative officer at Boston Common.

"The resolution was omitted this year because we essentially reversed the supporting statement and the resolve clause--that was it," Ms. Compere told SocialFunds.com. "The SEC ruled that we were asking about future liability which we have no business doing...."

This position of subverting corporate accountability is completely consistent with the tactics presented throughout the book, as Union Carbide and now Dow seek to do the absolute minimum in taking responsibility for the disaster. Through the course of the book, the reader feels a slow accretion of information that makes it impossible to comprehend the current position of Dow's refusal to accept accountability.

The book documents how the tragedy started years before the actual gas leak, as internal Union Carbide documents reveal how the Bhopal plant was inferior to its sister plant in the United States, and how the company was well aware of multiple safety breaches. The company was warned, both internally and externally, of the risk the plant posed to the surrounding population.

"Phosgene gas that was used by Hitler in his gas chambers, and that is used for the production of methyl isocyanate, is stored in a tank in this factory and if that leaks or explodes it will take one to one and half hour for the death of the entire population of the city," wrote Rajkumar Keswani in the October 1, 1982 edition of Rapat Weekly, two years before the disaster.

The book also reprints Union Carbide and Dow documents and explanations, but the companies' attempts to bolster their case against legal liability only serves to increase their moral liability in the reader's eyes (to borrow concepts advanced by SustainAbility in a recent report). One of the most devastating sections in a book filled with sections that brought this reviewer to tears is "Moral orientations to suffering," a 1995 essay by Delhi University professor Veena Das. The essay points out how the aftermath of the disaster essentially re-victimized the victims while absolving Union Carbide of its culpability.

In the end, the strength of the stories related in each of the sections cohere to become something much larger than a book, and more of a catalyst for readers to abandon complacency.

"I guess I am now expected to make my point, elaborate on the meaning of the stories, draw upon their interconnectedness and present a framework that holds them together," writes Satinath Sarangi, another of the book's editors, in an essay reprinted in the text. "That would, however, be straying away from why I really wanted to tell these stories."

"Why I really began telling these stories was to move you, dear reader, to action. Twenty years is much too long and we have had a lot of words," he continues. "No more interpretations, no more words--the point is to stop the medical disaster in Bhopal."

I originally published this review on SocialFunds.com.

Everyone remembers the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. Or at least most people do. Like all baby boomers remember about the JFK assassination or Neil Armstrong's landing on the moon. Exactly like the other two history altering events, news of the disaster hit the headlines all over the world. All those who read, saw or heard about it heaved a sigh of despair. In brief, for the benefit of those who are challenged on their recall abilities, the Bhopal gas tragedy involved the release of Methyl Isocyanate gas from a pesticide manufacturing plant in Bhopal, Central India. Forty tonnes of the poisonous cloud, that was released from the factory settled over the low-lying areas of the city. Within minutes innocent people, living in surrounding shanties and squatter camps, were transported into a lethal gas chamber facing a holocaust. It happened around midnight on December the 2nd, 1984. By sunrise of the 3rd over 2000 people lay dead or dying in homes and on the streets.

Morehouse and Subramanium's book on the Bhopal Gas Tragedy is a well-researched study about the Union Carbide and the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. The book starts with the history of Union Carbide, a company that came to colonial India in 1905. The company started the manufacture of "Eveready Flashlight Batteries" in 1926. "Eveready" and portable lighting became synonymous and was remembered with fondness in households across the cities, towns of villages of India. In 1969 the by now huge multinational corporation started a plant in Bhopal, to manufacture pesticides. By 1983, the company had 14 plants in India manufacturing chemicals, pesticides, batteries and other products. In December 1984, Union Carbide brought permanent darkness to the lives of thousands of residents in Bhopal, maimed and injured several hundred thousands more. The events of that fateful night left a swath of destruction and desolation that has only been rivaled by the nuclear explosions at Hiroshima.

What Morehouse and Subramanium have done is to take us backstage to the events that happened at the plant before the release of the gas, and the response of the various agencies after the disaster. The authors help us get a clearer understanding of what led to the disaster, the chaos and confusion that secondarily led to failure of the relief organizations. Later they explore the tangled web of litigation that followed. The authors critically evaluate the plant and point out the defects in the design of the plant, as well as the failures in the safety devices that led to exothermic chain reaction that caused the accumulation of the large quantities of the poisonous gas, and its final release into the atmosphere.

According to the authors, and this has been substantiated by several other publications, besides the failure of the plant management several other factors compounded the tragedy. Relief measures were botched, disaster sirens not blown, orderly evacuation not planned all leading to chaos and confusion. Later, lack of experience in dealing with mass disasters or knowledge on how to treat the suffering significantly influenced the mortality and morbidity. Political considerations paralyzed the Governments relief efforts while well meaning volunteer efforts were perceived as threats to Governmental stability. The post disaster record keeping and documentation was conducted so haphazardly as to prove worthless. Even today we remain with inadequate scientific evaluation of the disaster to develop preventive scenarios.

In later chapters, the authors describe the jurisdictional battles, the attempts by Union Carbide's Corporate lawyers to disown the subsidiary, transfer the case to India and several other legal maneuverings. The last three chapters answer two important questions (a) Can it happens here in the US? Yes, of course it can happen here, it has happened here at a subliminal level but a major tragedy could strike any chemicals factory in say Thailand or New Jersey, any day. The other question gives very creative information on what can we do to prevent future Bhopal's from happening. The book was written with Subramanium covering the first set of chapters about the situation in India and Morehouse writing the latter half. However, the book reads very seamlessly and has an absorbing narrative. It is eminently readable and extremely thought provoking.

The book is a classic study about the cause and effect of environmental disasters. It is also a clarion call for action by concerned activist groups for legislation on the "Right To Know Laws" about hazardous chemicals that are manufactured, stored or utilized in a community. Despite the numerous reassurances from the chemical manufacturers, occurrence of another Bhopal like tragedy cannot be ruled out with certainty. The authors suggest, preventing a future environmental disaster from happening can only be done by concerned public action, effective legislation and efficient enforcement of safety regulations. As they describe it, the calamity in Bhopal could have been used as an opportunity to revamp the existing imperfections in the hazardous chemicals industry.

Unfortunately the legal maneuvering in the Bhopal case precluded the judiciary from giving the chemical industry a sound warning. Those in the know of the turn of events know that the legal settlement failed in this important aspect, adding insult to injury heaped upon the citizens of Bhopal. Ultimately, the judicial failure in censuring the chemical industry absolved it of responsibility in vaporizing a city. Moreover as it did not serve a punitive warning to Multi-national corporations, it condoned the view that it was okay to place corporate greed above interests of the people and, company bottom line above human dignity. This book eloquently reveals that man really is at the mercy of mammon.

I am not much of a reader but this book simply took my breath away, the author did an excellent work that a thousand writers working for a thousand years could not have possibly realized.

NOT REVIEW:
The book is not available in Bhutan or else in India, though it is said to contian some facts on political turmoil in Bhutan. The author happened to be the close friend of the Third King of Bhutan, so the contents will be invaluable to the reseachers and the Bhutanese historians.