‘Animal’s People’ by Indra Sinha

'I used to be human once. So I'm told. I don't remember it myself, but people who knew me when I was small say I walked on two feet just like a human being.'
These are the opening lines of an extraordinary novel that I read a couple of years ago. Shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize, it is narrated by the central character, Animal. He recounts his story in shocking detail, the difficulties and obstacles of his existence set out without sentiment and often with robust humour. His language is, by turns, lewd, obscene and scatological; his two major preoccupations revolve around walking upright again and sex! He tells how life changed after 'that night' when an explosion in an American chemical factory in his slum changed life forever. There is a vibrancy about this story as Animal demonstrates his resilience as a severely disabled youth living at the lowest level of poverty in the fictional city of Khaufpur, the City of Fear.
Rather disingenuously the author, Indra Sinha, who now lives in France, claims, 'Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.' In fact, the city bears a striking resemblance to Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh, where on 3^rd December 1984 the American company Union Carbide, manufacturing pesticides, released 40 tonnes of lethal gas into the atmosphere. It remains the world's worst industrial disaster. More than 500,000 people were exposed and 15,000 people died, 8,000 within the first weeks, others in the ensuing decades.
Survivors of that nightmare are subject to spontaneous abortions and stillbirths and the babies that survive to be born suffer from a range of disabilities – some are blind or deaf or brain-damaged, others have missing or distorted limbs or facial disfigurements. Water is essential for life, yet the source for the people of Bhopal is toxic, abandoned chemicals still leaking into it, nearly 25 years after the initial disaster.
In June, 2010, seven former employees of Union Carbide, now a subsidiary of Dow Chemical Company, were found guilty of 'death by negligence' and fined around $2,000 each and sentenced to two years in prison. How can it be classified simply as negligence when in 1982 thirty major hazards were identified at the Bhopal plant but were not rectified while the same thirty major hazards were fixed at the company's identical plant in the USA? It shows, at the very least, a cynical disregard for life in Bhopal. Dow Chemical Company absolves itself of any liability for the tragedy in Bhopal because it did not merge with Union Carbide until 2001. However, it has undertaken all responsibility for more than 75,000 asbestos related law suits in the USA. These claims date from the 1940s and 1950s to the present.
India's cabinet has approved a decision to attempt to extradite Warren Anderson, the former CEO of Union Carbide. BP has spent $1.6 bn on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, in which 12 people died. It is expected to spend much more. Union Carbide has paid $0.6bn in compensation.
I have not included any photographs other than the one alongside this article – they are pitiful and horrific and immensely distressing. I, with thousands of others in the west, have the luxury of being almost certain that children and grandchildren will be born whole and straight and healthy. The women of Bhopal can have no such optimism.

The Jackson Factor

The late unfortunate Michael Jackson is in the news again – and again – and again. It would appear that UK news stations are determined to continue to exploit him. We think there is a phenomenon at work which we call 'The Jackson Factor'. It works thus – the amount of news coverage is in inverse proportion to the importance of any event. The highest Jackson Factor score would be 10 where news items of no global impact are given excessive/continuous exhaustive air time. The lowest score of 1 would be awarded to events of global significance that receive little or no media attention.

To illustrate the point take the example of serious life-threatening water shortage for millions of people. For many years the UN has warned that water shortages will become one of the most urgent problems worldwide in coming years. One estimate is that four billion people will be affected by 2050. India, with a growing population and increasing agricultural and manufacturing output, is facing huge problems of water supply in rural and urban areas. Climate change may mean there will be less rainfall in future. Northern India has experienced the driest season for more than eighty years; the monsoon is late and the people are praying for rain as they struggle to live through a widespread drought. Fights have broken out and murders have been committed as desperate people rush to fill vessels with water during the limited periods that water flows through the pipes. For example, in Bhopal, known as the 'City of Lakes', the thousand-year-old largest man-made lake has shrunk from 38 sq km to 5 sq km. The population, some 1.8 million, has had water rationed to 30 minutes' supply every other day since last October. That ration is now reduced to one day in three. Indore, not far from Bhopal, is rationed to 30 minutes' supply every seven days.

In the south Mumbai has had heavy rainfall and flooding but even so levels in the lakes have dropped, forcing the water supply to be cut by 30%.

This startling, appalling chain of events scores extremely low on the Jackson Factor scale. It fails to grab reporting honours for the following reasons: it lacks 'celebrities', it is happening in an impoverished continent not inhabited by Westerners, it has no spectator participation with the attendant thrill of feeling that 'your vote counts'.

Recent Michael Jackson UK media coverage scores 10. Calamitous events in Bhopal score 1. Casualties in Afghanistan, while not global, affect many nations whose military forces are engaged and receive very little coverage. Deaths are reported while large numbers of maimed survivors are barely mentioned. Civilian casualties in Afghanistan are rarely mentioned. Low Jackson Factor of ??

Can we expect or predict that this over-reporting of 'non-news' will continue in a downward spiral to banality? Are we seeing the end of serious reporting of dramatic global events that will affect us all? Has sensationalist celebrity reporting overtaken the serious business of presenting information on matters of international and global importance?

It would be interesting to know if this phenomenon is being seen in other countries around the world.