________________
FEATURES
THE END OF IMAGINATION
RAGU RAI/MAGNUM
Booker Prize winner, Arundhati Roy speaks passionately against nuclear bomb testing in India
war in which countries battle countries and men battle men. But it isn't. If there is a nuclear war, our foes will not be China or America or even each other. Our foe will be the Earth herself. The very elements - the sky, the air, the land, the wind and water - will all turn against us. Their wrath will be terrible.
Our cities and forests, our fields and villages will burn for days. Rivers will turn to poison. The air will become fire. The wind will spread the flames. When everything there is to burn has burned and the fires die, smoke will rise and shut out the sun. The Earth will be enveloped in darkness. There will be no day. Only interminable night.
Temperatures will drop far below freezing and nuclear The bomb cracks the Indian soul
winter will set in. Water will turn into toxic ice. AY 1998. IT WILL GO DOWN IN HISTORY BOOKS, PROVIDED | Radioactive fallout will seep through the earth and of course we have history books to go down in contaminate groundwater. Most living things, animal
Provided, of course, we have a future. There is and vegetable, fish and fowl, will die. Only rats and nothing new or original left to be said about nuclear weapons. cockroaches will breed and multiply and compete with relic I am prepared to grovel. To humiliate myself abjectly because foraging humans for what little food there is left. in the circumstances silence would be indefensible. So those of What shall we do then, those of us who are still alive? you who are willing: let's pick our parts, put on these discard- Burned and blind and bald and ill, carrying the cancerous ed costumes and speak our second-hand
carcasses of our children in our arms, lines in this sad second-hand play. But
where shall we go? What shall we let's not forget that the stakes we're "From now on it is not eat? What shall we drink? What shall playing for are huge. Our fatigue and
we breathe? our shame could mean the end of us.
The Head of the Health, The end of our children and our
Environment and Safety Group of the children's children. Of everything we
Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in love. We have to reach within ourselves
Bombay has a plan. He declared in an and find the strength to think. To fight.
interview that India could survive nuclear war. His advice Once again we are pitifully behind the times - not just is that if there is a nuclear war, we take the same safety scientifically and technologically ignore the hollow claims), measures as the ones scientists have recommended in the but more pertinently in our ability to grasp the true nature of event of accidents at nuclear plants. Take iodine pills, he nuclear weapons. If only, if only, nuclear war was just another suggests. And other steps such as remaining indoors, kind of war. If only it was about the usual things - nations and consuming only stored water and food and voiding milk. territories, gods and histories. If only those of us who dread it Infants should be given powdered milk. People in danger were just worthless moral cowards who are not prepared to die zone should immediately go to the ground floor and if in defence of our beliefs. If only nuclear war was the kind of possible to the basement
dying we must fear, but
living.”
24
Jain Spirit . June - August 2001 on International 2010/03
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