Are you going to watch it? The Discovery documentary with PM Modi in the wilderness with Bear Grylls? I am. What a clever, clever idea.
As I spoke on BBC News – if you want proof of climate change, then just ask NASA – their data, from the second cleverest scientists in the world, proves it. (The cleverest being the Indian ones who can do all NASA can, but at one tenth of the cost).
Doing the early morning BBC TV newspaper review allowed me in the past to vent some anger which has been boiling up for 20 years. The story I was asked to comment on was the fury of Obama at BP for the oil spill some years ago. Now I can imagine the President, pacing in the Oval office, the most powerful man in the world, with the largest nuclear arsenal, heading a country which has since its creation in 1776 never known a decade without war outside its borders, yet unable to put a boot on the throat of BP.
Now I don’t have a problem with the President’s anger, and indeed welcome it on issues of the environment. But I only wish the Americans could have given half a damn when it came to 3,000 dead Indians in Bhopal due to an American company and a chemical spill.
You see with BP – no one has died. Okay some Louisiana fisherman are suicidal, but with Bhopal mothers witnessed their children die. Dead. 3000. But it doesn’t count. Doesn’t count because poor Indians do not count. The lovely Louisiana coastline and the livelihood of one bloated American living in the world’s richest country counts more than 3,000 dead poor Indians.
I remember once being at the British High Commission in Delhi and the bantering with the High Commissioner he pointed out I was British. And I told him – he is right I am. But the blood coursing through these veins is that of my ancestors. I am a British Indian. Sadly the Louisiana Governor at the time, Bobby Jindal, I suspect was all American – he’s drunk the Kool aid as they say.
It should be said of Indians you can take the Indian out of India but not India out of the Indian – wish it was true. How I wish the Bobby hadn’t converted. How I wish Bobby would have the guts to tell the President where to go. Anyway, why should he, lower than Indians are poor people and poor people don’t matter.
