The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [116]
On a drive through the outskirts of Varanasi, the smells of diesel, shit, and curry assault the nostrils, carried through the open window of the taxi with a blast of 110-degree heat. For those unused to it, the humidity makes even breathing a chore. The car narrowly avoids countless collisions as it merges onto the Grand Trunk Highway, a chaos of cars, motorcycles, bicycles, and honking cargo trucks running clear between New Delhi in the west and Kolkata (Calcutta) in the east. Just as suddenly as it entered the highway, however, the taxi veers through a claustrophobic alley to break suddenly into agricultural fields. Water buffalo and wooden carts amble slowly past orderly plots of green wheat and sugarcane, pixilated with the bright saris of women stopping to weed and till. The landscape looks almost biblical—or would if not for the Bollywood music screeching from the Lok Samiti school in the middle of the village of Mehdiganj.
Several hundred people, mostly women and children, sit on blankets spread on the grass between smudged yellow walls. Onstage, teenage girls in saris of crimson, saffron, and cobalt shake their hips and arms to the Bollywood numbers, seemingly impervious to the heat. In contrast to Chiapas, there is no obesity here. The peasants live lean and close to the bone, and children sport the sallow eyes and sharp angles of malnutrition. After the dancing, the head of the school, Nandlal Master, steps up to the podium to congratulate the girls on completing a summer certificate program, with courses including candlemaking, sewing, and computers. With speakers buzzing, he announces the name of each girl along with that of her father, as one by one they rise to accept their diplomas.
The school is only the most visible project of Lok Samiti, which translates to “people’s committee” in Hindi. “Lok Samiti follows the Gandhian idea of village democracy,” Nandlal says after the ceremony, once the girls have piled into a three-wheeled pickup to be taken home. The air fills with the woodsy smell of burning cow dung, as the men congregate around a buzzing electric light. “Our idea is that people in the villages should have jobs and stay rather than go to the city, and that production should be done by hand and not by machines.”
The villages around Varanasi are prized for their silk saris, and Nandlal himself comes from a family of weavers. His father died when he was only five years old; perhaps because of that loss, he in turn has become a father figure to some of the village children, teaching weaving skills and eventually opening his own school. Over time, the group grew into a one-stop social services agency, called upon to settle land disputes and domestic squabbles, and performing a group marriage ceremony for couples each spring. So it was only natural that farmers would come to the committee when they began having problems with their neighbor, a Coca-Cola bottling plant.
The plant here dates back to 1995, built by Indian company Parle to produce local soft drinks Thums Up, Limca, and Gold Spot. In 1999, however, a division of Coca-Cola India purchased the plant and almost immediately workers began clashing with the company over working conditions. As in Colombia, only a fraction of the workers in the plant—some thirty-five or forty people—are permanent. The rest, up to two hundred workers, are employed only on short-term contracts, allowing the company to save on pay and benefits. Unhappy with the arrangement, workers appealed