if only you could smell it...!

Rested and reinvigorated, we have entered our second day in India - tho it definitely feels like our first! Breakfast was delicious, a combination of dosas and puuris and all kinds of condiments, dal and chutneys. We are adjusting and the weather is helping - today is cool and rainy.

Almost everything is in English, from street signs to advertisements. Apparently, all government documents are sent out to the various states in english, and then translated to the myriad of languages found across the subcontinent. While that is strange, it had been extrordinarily helpful to us - bargaining for a taxi from our hotel to the office suddenly becomes quite doable. Riding in the taxi, however, puts every experience in transit I have ever had to shame. Colombia and Jamaica have nothing on this - it feels like a rollercoaster oh mi gosh but its not feeling. We have consistently driven down the wrong side of the street into oncoming traffic. Squeezed next to huge buses and trucks that don't see us or don't care and stopped split seconds short of being plastered to the back of a bus.

The colors and people here are shockingly beautiful - a blend of rich fabrics and sultry tones that highlights the superfly hues of brown skin all around us. What's not so fly is the smells of exhaust and garbadge that assault your nose when traveling across the city. From our hotel you can see piles of trash - next to empty dumpsters! There are no zoning regulations in Chennai - so the architecture is a hodge podge of buildings, occasional sidewalks and crumbling streets. Traffic is made up of oversized buses and trucks, three wheel motorcycle taxis, motos and pedi taxis, with everyone vying for supremacy. Apparently non-fatal accidents are common on regular streets, with worse ones occurring regularly on the highway. We have no plans of getting on the highway.

Our main prupose here is to help with a campaign against the expansion of an already highly toxic chemical plant in Cuddalore. We shipped an air monitor here through DSL on their promise that we would have no problem with customs because it would be going back to the States. I guess those DSL folks will say just about anything, because today is the third day of problems, and new ones pop up each day.

Remember that India has no regulations for pollution? There is nothing to limit the release of toxins into the air, water or land. The process, which has taken five years just to get started, is now one and a half years in the making, moves extremely slowly due to bureacracy, AND DOES NOT INCLUDE ANY COMMUNITY REPRESENTATIVES. So even though it is the community who has demanded this process and illustrated the need for such regulations through bucket samples and odor logs, their voice is ignored so that industry and government can continue to collude in the spread of contamination under the guise of development.

It is however, reminscent of how weak the EPA is in the US, and how in-the-pocket-of-industry the Dept of Environmental Quality in Louisiana is though...