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Week of 4.17.09
David's Journal from India: Day 3Read:
Day 1 |
Day 2
| Day 3
| Day 4
| Day 5
| Day 6
| Day 7
| Day 8, part I
Hardiwar, Cham, and UttarkashiDay 8, part II | Day 9 | Day 10 | Day 11 | Day 12 Who Gives a "Dam"? A wrong turn means we get to drive along most of the winding perimeter of the reservoir behind the Tehri Dam. Every eight kilometers our India-based colleague Rohit Ghandi promises it will be just another eight kilometers. That promise gets repeated another six times, so it becomes the scenic route to the village of Cham. The former village of Cham, I should say. When the controversial dam went up the government forced thousands of villagers to move to higher ground or to move away completely. Who got compensation and how much compensation remains a bitter point of contention. Some are still furious that they are being moved out of their homes. 
David interviews Bachan Singh, who is being forced out of his home by the rising waters of the reservoir created by the Tehri Dam on the Ganges. He had farmed land close to Ganges. It was irrigated with spring water, not river water, but the Ganges is used for just about everything else, he said, including its religious role. He simply does not believe scientists who say that the climate is changing and that could hurt the river. He believes it is a sacred river, fed by vast snow fields in the mountains, and it can never change. I asked if he had ever made the pilgrimage to the glacier that feeds the river. No, he'd only been to Uttarkashi once, a city about two hours away. 
The former village of Cham near the Tehri Dam. The houses were demolished after residents were forced to relocate after the dam was constructed. Mr. Singh's expression turned downcast when I asked if his grandkids will be able to visit him when he moves away to the new land the government has given him: Not too often, he says. 
A woman carries a vessel of water through the demolished town of Cham. High Altitude Lexicon "If the glacier is melting away, are not dams one solution?"
When you get stuck in a minibus on long drives with mountain climbers you glean some of the mountaineering lexicon. Conrad's adventures stretch from the South Pole to Everest to Denali in Alaska. High-altitude cameraman Thom Pollard has shot on Everest and many other spots where the air is thin. Here is what I've picked up so far: "Trundling" is the compunction of some climbers to find huge, loose boulders and shove them off precipices for dramatic effect. Not that Thom, Conrad, or Bill would ever do such a thing. And even more terrifying: "Flossing" is when two climbers are high up, separated laterally by rope. They fall. The loop between them catches climbers below and pulls them down to their doom as well. I am reassured that no flossing is planned during our trek out of Gangotri to the glacier, which begins in three days.Visit "On Thin Ice" to watch the hour-long NOW on PBS special and learn more about global warming.
*Note: All photographs by John Siceloff unless otherwise credited.Read Day 4: A Hair-Raising Drive |
Electric Car Dreams
Water World
Nurses Needed
Who Killed the Electric Car?
PBS Special Report: Health Care Reform
