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Water: Escalating from Topic of Conversation to Social Unrest Trigger
It’s like when you say gas prices are a big problem, it means, “OK, we’ve got to downsize. Nobody can afford SUVs any more. You’ve got to use smaller cars.” But that’s not the problem with water. The problem is not simply that you have to stop watering your garden, or that not everyone can have a swimming pool. The problem that we face with water in countries like India, Asia, China, and Africa is you don’t get water in your taps. There’s a great willingness to just talk about it as long it is a peripheral problem that can develop into something much more acute later on. But it will become a serious and very dramatic problem in the West when, for example, it’s not that you have to downsize to a small car, but that you can’t have a car because you can’t get gas—there is no more gas. That’s the situation we’re going to have with water. When people don’t have water, there will be thirsty people walking around that will attack your car if their child is dying because of thirst—because they know you are carrying bottles of water. That’s the situation that will cause a lot of social unrest, and ultimately it will lead to gated communities, guarded cars, and people with guns sitting in cars to protect themselves—against what? Against roving gangs of people in search of water within a city. »
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In this blog, I display my own photos and discuss issues involving water that have inspired Paani ("Water"), a film I am developing to examine the daily struggle for water in the slums of Mumbai.
Shekhar Kapur is India's top-grossing film-maker and Oscar-winning director. A sampling of Kapur's work: |
