Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [39]
Clearly, Indira Gandhi had no great affection for her country’s maharajahs and nawabs. When the British left, her father Jawaharlal Nehru and the leaders of the Indian independence movement had taken power away from them. She had then proceeded to confiscate their last remaining privileges and possessions. Eduardo Muñoz saw their persecution as a providential gift. The imaginative Argentinian dreamed of building in Bhopal, in tandem with the pesticide plant, a research center along the lines of the American Boyce Thompson Institute. After all, the Indian climate and the diseases and insects that damaged its crops were all factors associated with its particular environment. An Indian research center might come up with a new generation of pesticides better suited to the country. It would be an opportunity for the future plant to diversify its production and, who knows, perhaps one day hit the jackpot with new molecules that could be exported all over Asia. Indian researchers and technicians would work for salaries ten or twelve times less than those of their American colleagues. All that was missing was a location. When Muñoz discovered that the brother of the last nawab, threatened with government expropriation, was seeking to sell his Jehan Numa palace, he leaped at the chance. Rising magnificently from Shamla Hill, one of the seven hills surrounding the city, the edifice dominated the town. Its park, made up of ten acres of tropical vegetation, rare trees, shrubs and exotic blooms, formed a sumptuous oasis of coolness, color and scent. The building would probably have to be demolished, but the estate was vast enough to accommodate research laboratories, planetaria, greenhouses and even a luxurious guest house for passing visitors. Convinced that an Indian would handle the purchase more adeptly than he, Muñoz placed his assistant, Ranjit Dutta, in charge of negotiations. They were hustled through. Three days later, this jewel of Bhopal’s ancestral patrimony fell into the clutches of the American multinational for the rock-bottom price of one million one hundred thousand rupees, approximately $65,000. *
16
A New Star in the Indian Sky
The India of the naked sadhus, * of sacred elephants caparisoned in gold; the India of devotees of a million gods praying in the waters of the Ganges; the India of sari-draped women planting rice in the south or picking leaves in the tea plantations of the Himalayas; the immemorial India of the worshippers of Shiva, Muhammad and Buddha; the India that had given the world prophets and saints such as Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Ramakrishna, Sri Aurobindo and Mother Teresa. The India of our fantasies, myths and dreams, had yet another face: the country was, by the 1960s, a developing industrial and technological power.
Few people found this more surprising than the small group of American engineers sent to Bombay by Union Carbide in 1960 to build a petrochemical complex. The venture united two vastly different cultures, with the magic of chemistry as their only common denominator. This encounter proved so productive that Carbide took on a whole team of young Indian engineers to inject new blood into the veins of the mighty American company. All those young men thought, worked and dreamed in English. They came from great schools like the Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute of Bombay founded by the British, or those created by the young Indian republic like the Madras Technical College, the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and the prestigious Rajputi College in Pilani. Some were graduates of eminent Western universities like Cambridge, Columbia or Boston’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or Christian, whatever their religion, they shared the same faith in science. The mantras they