Wampum

One of this Sunday's editorials at The Times of India, my breakfast read for the past week.

Land. Water. Minerals. Guns. They are all connected. In India's heartland, after the last metalled [paved] road has turned into a dirt track, there are villages where people have not seen tap water and electricity. They have never met a doctor or gone to school. They live in the middle of dense forests, sharing space with dangerous animals. They live on fertile land, but there is never enough food in their stomachs. Hunger they are familiar with and now they are simmering with anger. They realise that they were never given a chance to live with dignity.

They are India's original inhabitants - the indigenous people we call the tribals [Adivasi]. Now, they are caught in a deadly crossfire between the rebels who claim that they are waging a war on their behalf and the State that says it's trying to protect them from the Maoists' [Naxalites] mindless violence.

Not sure whom to believe, the tribals are confused. And they wonder why there hasn't been any change in their lives for such a long time.

In Chhattisgarh, the state with the highest tribal population in the country, even basic civic amenities like roads, health centres and education facilities are lacking. Even the areas in the grip of violence are beyond the reach of the police forces. The wells here are dry. The land is parched. The roads are dusty. The people are famished.

It's the same story in Jharkhand. Even after seven years of its creation, more than 80% of the tribal villages in Jharkhand are without roads, electricity, potable water and health centres.

There is no irrigation facility in more than 90% of the state. No wonder when the Maoists walk into a village and talk of revolution, people listen to them. No wonder when people hear about the mining companies coming and taking away their mineral wealth, they are enraged.

They want their land back. They want their forests intact. And they don't want others to exploit their minerals. When they see everything slipping away from their hands, they turn to guns.

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We'd two taxis to take the six of us -- Werner, Marcus, Elmar, Jordi, Normand, Amadeau and I, from the five star back to our modest hotel in in the Chaina Market area of Karol Bagh. Our drivers were from Himachal Pradesh, in the Western Indian Himalayas, and it was late, and they got lost (as did we, by this point we should have had the route down cold), and The Family Restaurant was closed, so we drove on a bit to a nearby Deccan restaurant.

The owner, looking as Deccan as his staff, chatted with us. We were French speaking (along with Catalan, German, and English) so he spoke to us in French, as well as English. He was from Punduchery, so his parents were French nationals until 1955, then dual nationals, India and France, and so he was a French national, as well as an Indian national.

The first world war did not start in August, 1914. The first world war took place between 1756 and 1763. Anglo-Americans know it as the French and Indian War. In Europe it was the Seven Years War. For us it was the end of the Beaver Wars, and for the French on the Back of the Turtle, and the French in India, it was the end of an era. The second capture of the Fortress of Louisbourg, the defeat of Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham, and in French India, the defeat of Lally at Vandavasi and the seige, and reduction, of Punduchery.

Many people from the south come to Delhi and stay, and eat, at Deccan guest houses and Deccan restaurants. And for this evening, he was our host. Dinner was 60 rupies, vegetarian, and wicked good.

My last night in Delhi the taxi queue lottery at the conference hotel awarded me one of the previous night's drivers, and with his assistance, I found Pashmina similar to the photo above.

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My last three days in New Dehli were my most comfortable days. I'd a room that was quieter and I was sleeping nights, and the work at the conference was going well. One morning the driver misunderstood which five star hotel he was supposed to deliver us to -- the Taj Mahal hotel or the Taj Palace, several kilometers distant. It was educational, like every prior wrong turn, and we glimpsed the Presidential Palace through the trees.

In the evenings we ate at family restaurants in the Chaina Market area of Karol Bagh, and walked back to our hotel down quiet streets. We felt safer than we'd felt walking around the prior conference hotel venue -- the up-scale hotels at LAX. We reached agreement how to handle variants in Farsi and Arabic for a particular label, and four of us started work to replace something fundamentally broken that has constrained how scripts are used in labels. We're Iranian, Pakistani, Indian (dots) and Indian (feathers).

Other than explaining that the "war of movement" (Summer-Fall of 1914) aka "the early contests", are different from the "war of attrition" (Winter 1914 - 8 August 1918) aka "now till the convention (modulo Texas)", and different from the general campaign, and different from the post-election legal effort to protect the vote, I had a week without the Hero Twins or their supporters. My co-workers seem to have understood me when I said the American Left had lost its candidates, and all that was left was cannibalism and witch hunts for orthodoxy in a Party that appears to be following the French to electoral defeat.

Outside one can glimpse the issues -- development in India and China, lack of development in Africa, the shoot-down of USA 193 link, link and link, as creeping militarization of space.

The return leg of the flight passed again over Afghanistan, then turned north and went directly over the pole, in darkness, so what sea ice there is this season couldn't be seen, then south to Chicago.

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Every morning I leave a very modest hotel and travel across New Delhi, sometimes in a three-wheeled open taxi, others in a closed car. The conference hotel is not very modest. It is the pick of the Ministry of Telecommunications.

The Delhi Sustainable Development Summit started while I was somewhere over the North Atlantic, between Labrador and Norway, on a flight that took me over Greenland and Iceland. It came to an end while I was working on issues relating to the Internet, minutia no wampum reader is likely to ever think about, things like clarifying the correctness of the semantics of inet_addr(), which I suppose I deserve (see link), or the fact that entries in ISO 3166 are not necessarily "countries", nor are they necessarily "territories", which involves groveling about in code tables and updates, and finally, whether an "internationalized domain", whether the ASCII label originated from a table entry in ISO 3166 or from the US Doc (.com, .net, .org), or from the ICANN "new gTLD process", is operated by one, or several registry operators, was an unexplored assumption.

I wish I were contributing even half as significantly as this small list of minutia to the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit. It follows on the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, and the 13th COP (conference of parties) held at Bali in December 2007, venues where Al Gore was "a contributor".

Yesterday the headline in Le Soir in Bruxelles, which I read in New Dehli, was the mention that thousands of people die from pollution each year in Belgium. Every evening leaving the island of green and quiet of the first class hotel and returning across Dehli to a vastly more modest hotel, my eyes fill with grit and I pass a half hour with the fumes and dust of third world metropolis. The connection between global warming, fossil fuels (types, mode of use, gas and particulate combustion by-products), public health, and poverty is obvious.

Climate change, carbon, this isn't just about penguins and polar bears sometime over the event horizon rainbow. Its about cities gasping for air, and water, and while the rich, those with health care, can eke out a living, even a beautiful life, down the wealth curve to the walking poor its just days taken from our lives.

h/t to Susie for Al Gore.

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