Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [40]
“One good thing about this recognition was that it dispelled the archaic image many Westerners had of our country,” the engineer Kamal Pareek would say. Son of an Uttar Pradesh lawyer, a graduate of the celebrated Pilani college, tennis champion and American film buff, at twenty-three, this baby-faced young man was the embodiment of the youthful Indian energy Carbide was keen to harness. “We Indians have always been particularly sensitive to the potential of the transformation of matter,” he confided. “Our most ancient Sanskrit texts show that this sensitivity is part of our culture. We have a long-standing tradition of producing the most elaborate perfumes. Since the dawn of time our Ayurvedic medicine has used chemical formulae borrowed from our plants and minerals. The mastery of chemical elements is part of our heritage.” Pareek loved to furnish examples. “In Rajasthan there is a tribe of very backward people called the Bagrus,” he recounted. “They make dyes for fabrics out of indigo powder, which they mix with crushed horn from horses’ hoofs. To that they add pieces of bark from an ashoka tree and the residues of ant-infested corn. These people who have had no education, who are completely ignorant of the chemical phenomena operating at the heart of their concoctions, are on a par with the foremost chemists. Their dyes are the best in the world.”
The first chemical plant Carbide built in India was inaugurated on December 14, 1966. The blue-and-white flag hoisted into the sky over the island of Trombay, near Bombay, was symbolic. A few miles from the spot where, four and a half centuries earlier, the galleon Hector had unloaded the first British colonizers, it embodied the desire of a new set of adventurers to make India a platform for its industrial worldwide expansion. After the island of Trombay, it was Bhopal’s Kali Grounds that were to see the same flag fly over a highly sophisticated plant. The potentially deadly toxicity of its intended products had, however, sown doubt in the minds of a few members of the New York management team. Was it wise to hand over technology as complex and dangerous as that associated with methyl isocyanate to a third world country? In the end the excellent qualifications of the Indian engineers recruited for the Trombay factory allayed their fears. The Indians were invited to South Charleston to have some input into the plans for the Bhopal plant, an experience that the young technician, Umesh Nanda, son of a small industrialist in the Punjab, would never forget.
“Encountering the Institute Sevin plant was like being suddenly projected into the next millennium,” he recalled. “The technical center designing the project was a hive inhabited by an army of experts. There were specialists in heat exchangers, centrifugal pumps, safety valves, control instruments and all the other vital parts. You had only to supply them with the particulars of such-and-such an operation to receive in return descriptions of, and detailed plans for, all the apparatus and equipment necessary. To mitigate the dangerous nature of the substances we were going to be using in Bhopal, bulky safety reports told us about all the safety devices installed at the Institute. For weeks on end, we made a concerted effort with our American colleagues to imagine every possible incident and its consequences: a burst pipe, a pump breaking down, an anomaly in the running of a reactor or a distillation column.”
“It was a real pleasure working with those American engineers,” confirmed Kamal Pareek. “They were so professional, so attentive to details, whereas we Indians often have a tendency to overlook them.