We can’t sustain this whole idea of megacities of 40 million people, which is what our are going towards, where all the water drawn up and pumped into the cities and then sold only to those people that can afford it, while the rural areas and all water aquifers have all dried up.

I realized that a drought will hit the city too. New York will reach a point where this precinct gets water between 5 and 6 pm while other ones get it between 7 and 8, and so on.

In most of Africa, life is dominated by water. And in most cites in India now, daily lives are dominated by the availability of water. What time does water come? Now you have to get up at 4 am. It’s no longer, “What time do the kids go to school?”

Water Wars

The world is running out of fresh water and every country, every nation, will have to go to war to keep the water running the way it is running now. Then what do you do? There will be water wars in urban areas. There will be guns and people will be fighting for water. You’re going to have guns surrounding the water tankers, and the water places. How are you going to live in this megacity?

I am a little afraid of the corporatization and organization of water, because when it gets corporatizedand organized, it goes into the profit mode. Then it’s just those who can afford water whp will get it. Those who cannot will have to fight for it.

Paani: the Movie

These are the influences that have led me to make Paani (which means "water" in Hindi), a film about water. Here was the first pitch to myself :

"A city of 20 million people has run out of water. Whatever little water is still available, is sucked up by those that can still afford it, and protected with armed might. Water has now become a currency, and is used as weapon of political and social oppression. The Water Wars have broken out. "

That's what I started with. Now I had to design that City. Now I had to start thinking of characters. Of emotional story lines. Of a begining. Of an end. And of course I knew that I was about to embark on a hugely expensive film. To create on film a city of the future.

I am hoping to make a very entertaining, commercial film that, at the end of the day, is an emotional and satisfying cinematic experience for people. When you took a film like, say, The Day after Tomorrow, it was enjoyable—it was a huge hit—but you didn’t believe it because it was so overdramatic.

I Want to Start a Movement

On the other hand, something like An Inconvenient Truth really hit you so hard. That’s a film that caused a movement. It caused huge awareness. I am hoping that Paani will do the same—be a commercial success and a commercial hit, and people will say, “Oh man, he’s right, this film’s right, that’s really where we are going. We’re heading to that if we’re not careful.”

I didn’t think of Paani as a futuristic film until actually I started to look into the future with this idea of global warming. As I have been thinking about this for ten years, and then started to write my script and do other things, the world thankfully is catching up. So now everybody is saying, “You are making the film at the right time.” But I had better make the film fast, because soon it will be too late—soon the film I making will have already happened.