The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [115]
To this day, Rogers insists he hadn’t intended the meeting to turn physical—but he doesn’t regret what happened. “It certainly got more attention,” he grins. One person who noticed was B. Wardlaw, a descendent of a member of the 1919 syndicate and the company’s largest individual shareholder, with 77,000 shares of common stock worth more than $4 million at the time. “The cops didn’t have to choke you and drag you off to earn my respect,” he wrote in a handwritten note to Rogers. “But, hey, Ray, I certainly admire the way you handle yourself!” Enclosed was a $5,000 check to Corporate Campaign, Inc.
Meanwhile, major stories on the incident appeared in The Washington Post and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, casting an unflattering light on Daft. And a month later, a new Fortune cover story slamming Coke mentioned its refusal to investigate in Colombia a “public relations nightmare.” Encouraged by so much success just a year into the campaign, Rogers redoubled efforts for the coming school year—looking for a big campus in the United States that could serve as a poster child for the campaign. By that time, however, Colombia wasn’t the only issue being talked about on campus. Rogers’s open invitation to take part in the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke was taken up by a campaign against Coke in another country. While less sensational than murder, the allegations were potentially damaging to Coke’s core business in one of its key growth markets overseas—India.
NINE
All the Water in India
The sun has yet to come up over the horizon as a boy pushes his wooden skiff into the current of the holy river Ganges. Already the city is waking up. Yellow lights shine from the tiers of steps along the bank, and men stripped to the waist and women in colorful saris descend for ablutions to Ganga Ma in a ritual as ancient as anything on earth. Nowhere in the world is water as revered as in Varanasi, the holiest city of Hinduism, where every Hindu Indian is expected to bathe at least once in life, and where, Hindus believe, to be cremated is to skip to the head of the line of reincarnation straight through to liberation.
Temples built centuries ago by maharajas from desert lands line the steps along the river, or ghats, where the sacred and profane intermingle now with the dawn. Tourists with zoom lenses watch from rowboats as ascetics smeared with ash strike yoga poses on concrete walls and dhobiwallahs soaked thigh-deep in the river beat the city’s dirty laundry against stone blocks. Ads painted on the ghats boast of guesthouses and book-stores, silk emporiums and German bakeries. Amid piles of trash and scavenging children, someone has painted in English: “Fortunate are those who live along the banks of Ganga.”
Among all of the ironies of the river, however, the deepest is how much the water of this holy river is rife with pollution. The upstream side of Varanasi has a fecal coliform bacteria count of 600,000 per liter—more than one hundred times what’s considered safe for bathing. At the downstream end, levels approach 15 million. Meanwhile, a toxic soup of heavy metals—including cadmium, chromium, and lead—flows downstream from the electroplating factories, tanneries, and brick kilns. All of that makes the Ganges, as The Economist put it, “a cloudy brown soup of excrement and industrial effluent.”
It’s not a lack of environmental laws that makes it that way—regulations in India are as strict as those in the United States or Europe. Nor is it insufficient resources or political will. Since 1985, the government has spent some 14 billion rupees ($300 million) on an ambitious cleanup plan that includes sewage treatment and chromium recovery. Sadly, the plan has been a colossal disappointment, beset by power failures and local indifference, lack of enforcement, and outright corruption. Nearly half of those who bathe regularly in the river suffer from skin diseases and stomach ailments, according to local