Five Past Midnight in Bhopal by Dominique Lapierre & Javier Moro

Author:Dominique Lapierre & Javier Moro [LAPIERRE, DOMINIQUE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446561242
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

29

“My Beautiful Plant Was Losing Its Soul”

The young engineer who had risked his life escorting the first barrels of MIC from Bombay to Bhopal could not believe it. “When we were asked to show the new superdirector around the factory, it felt like taking a tourist round Disneyland,” Kamal Pareek would recall.

Chakravarty knew nothing at all about how a plant of that kind worked. He did not know what most of the components were for. He got their names wrong: what he was calling a mixer was in fact a blender. In English the two words may mean essentially the same thing, but in Bhopal’s technical jargon, they referred to distinct parts. “We realized at once that this savior they’d sprung on us was not party to the mystique of the chemical industry,” Pareek would remember. “The only thing he was interested in was figures and accounts.”

This might still have turned out for the good, if only the new superdirector had been prepared to admit that a plant like that could not be run like a battery factory; if he could have graciously acknowledged that, in a company of that kind, decisions must come from all levels, each one affecting as it did the lives of thousands of people; if he had understood that seemingly favorable conditions could suddenly swing the other way, that the levels in the tanks were constantly rising and falling, that the combustion of the reactors varied by the moment; in short, that it was impossible to run that sort of plant simply by sending out memos from his directorial armchair. “When you’re in charge of a pesticide plant,” Pareek explained, “you have occasionally to come out of your office, put on overalls and join the workers on site, breathing in the smell of grass and boiled cabbage.”

Carbide’s great achievement had been that of integrating a vast spectrum of different cultures and guaranteeing the humblest of its workers the right to speak. Unfortunately, neither Jagannathan Mukund, though steeped in considerable American experience, nor his superior from Calcutta, seemed inclined to engage in a dialogue. Their understanding of human relations appeared to be based upon a concept of caste, not in the religious sense, but in a hierarchical sense. The introduction of such rifts was, little by little, to corrupt, divide and demotivate.

“Once drastic cuts became the sole policy objective, and one man’s say-so was the only authority, we knew the plant was inevitably going to hell,” Kamal Pareek would confirm.

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