Last week I had a lull in work, and decided to go to some talks on India. I heard Scott Bayman, the CEO of General Electric India, speak at SAIS, and then the next day I went to the Wilson Center to a mini-conference to hear the president of Tata Inc., and Undersecretary of the Commerce, and a professor at U Penn speak about Globalization, capital G. (In between I also went to a talk by Khal Schneider about California tribes and private land tenure around Ukiah in the mid-nineteenth century, which was almost more interesting than anything else.)
But this is the thing. At the very end of the Wilson Center conference I stood waiting to talk to the speaker, Professor Devesh Kapur. I wanted to tell him about Business-Community Synergies’ findings on land tenure in Orissa, India, and the interplay with multi-national mining companies. In bouts of wishful thinking, the state government of Orissa had given permits to mine in areas where land titles are scarce. The land is inhabited and used by tribal Adivasis; there is no square inch of land unaccounted for in the informal realm–the recorded deeds just don’t exist. (Taking a lesson from the California Indians of 1870, they need to hire a lawyer. Or two.) There have been some resulting problems, and there’s an interesting clash of modern legality and ancient rights.
So I was standing there, waiting, when I saw a woman and her friend approach up the aisle. She had asked a question about land tenure as well, and I recognized her from previous South Asia-related events. As she passed, I made eye contact, but she didn’t respond, so I said, excuse me, I think I’ve met you before. I had an ulterior motive: I suspected her to be a professor at Howard who researches refugees and displacement, and I sometimes think about getting a PhD in environment/people things, and Howard is a neat place. But she only said, brusquely, I don’t think so. I said, Oh, umm, do you by any chance know Moazzam Sidiqqi? She said, Who? And I realized it couldn’t be her, because the woman I was thinking of was a close friend of Moazzam’s, and only came to his Urdu poetry classes because she had a big crush on him. So I said, Never mind, I’m sorry, it must have been someone else. Who, she said, is Moazzam? He was the Voice of America Urdu director, but now he teaches Urdu and Persian poetry every now and then, I mumbled, knowing I was on the wrong track. Well, she said, I don’t know him, but I sometimes go to SAIS, like last week I gave a talk there. I said, Oh, I graduated from SAIS, so I must have seen you at some event there. And what do you do now? She asked. I work on international development and the extractive industries, I said eagerly, trying to get my footing back, trying to get to the part where we talk about land tenure and her research. Poor you, she said, and swept passed me.
She couldn’t sweep very far, because there were people right in front of us, so she stood there with her back to me. Her friend had given a little giggle at the comment, but then realized it was meant in meanness not humor, and though she stood with her back to me as well, she gave a furtive embarrassed glance back. I’m confused by rudeness; I don’t know what to do. My first instinct was to laugh, nod, and say something self deprecating, but her back was already in my face. Then I wanted to tap her on the shoulder and say, Who are you? That’s all I wanted to know.
There are two things in this story that puzzle me. First,how did she make the SAIS connection? Either she knew that I had been a student there, or that Moazzam had been a teacher there. The other thing is this: it was either the mention of mining, oil and gas industries that generated the hatefulness, or the mention of international development. Both of them could have. And I can understand why, but I think it’s bull. (The first for reasons I’ll explain below, the second because jargon is sometimes useful.) Even if she didn’t wear earrings, drive a car, and heat her home with the earth’s extracted resources, it would still be in her interest as much as anyone’s to make sure that those industries act responsibly toward their bottom line–the earth–and their partners–the communities where they operate. Saying “poor you” to someone working on those things is more than snobbery, it’s … I don’t know. Dumb.
We all (you, that means, too) try to live lightly, if not only because most of us are on some kind of budget. My budget is CO2 as much as it is money–I drive a low emission vehicle, keep my home colder or hotter than is comfortable depending on the weather, and wear two 65-year old rings on my finger. I bought a house so that I could have a compost pile and a vegetable garden. I made a new year’s resolution to buy nothing new for myself except food, and the average age of our furniture is 40 years old. I buy my meat and dairy products from an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania. I switched the majority of my grandmother’s investments to socially responsible funds. But: I fly to California several times a year. I can’t wait to go back to India. I make stained glass with mined virgin lead and silica. I buy pomelos from Vietnam. I take hot showers, and I don’t have a solar thermal system installed (yet, and anyway it wouldn’t work in this weather). We do what we can, and meanwhile the multinational mining companies continue digging, drilling, pumping and transporting the materials of our civilizations. We can’t turn a blind eye–don’t. We can’t ask for a moratorium on the train wreck of globalization, if that’s what you think it is, and sometimes it looks it–don’t. Do demand that they do their jobs as responsibly as possible, taking unforeseen and unintended consequences into consideration and looking at the business case as a holistic dynamic system. If our companies start to incorporate that ethic then maybe China’s will too, some day. India’s big ones already do, probably because they’ve had to worry about their social license to operate for a lot longer than ours have. There aren’t many powerful stakeholders in Nevada or Nigeria; whereas India’s civil society can pull a lot of strings.
I still don’t know who that lady was, but I’m sure I’ll see her again, and now she is my arch enemy–my foe. Ahh, the old foe. John has a foe already, but that’s another story, and I don’t even know it, so I can’t tell it. My last foe was in the SF ballet school when I was 12, her name was Karen. We were both in the first professional level, and she won the foe battle because I quit ballet. I announced that I was quitting right before the curtains rose on a flower dance–I was a petal, she was the petal across from me, we were about to uncurl from our bud–and she responded “good.” Lovely foes. I’m just kidding though; this time I won’t quit, and I won’t even think of her as my foe. I’ll maybe find out what her head trip is, but I definitely won’t be looking into her graduate program, even if she is at Howard.
Anyways, you all come visit.
