Syriana

I remember that Syriana and Munich were released at the same time back in 2005. I wanted to watch both the movies for their close to non-fiction plots but ended up watching Munich in theater and adding Syriana to my 100+ list on Blockbuster after the DVD was released.
Last week, I was watching a session of Jeff Skoll on TED and learned the connection between Syriana, Charlie Wilson's War (a movie I liked), An Inconvenient Truth, ebay and social entrepreneurship. Jeff's company Participant Productions produced all these movies and is a great platform to learn, share and discuss geo-social issues and ideas. To take part go here. The first thing I did after realizing the connection was pushing all Participant Productions movies in my Blockbuster list to the top and I just finished Syriana. It's a movie that requires lot of focus and concentration. It's jam packed with plots and information on quite a few issues including capitalism, oil addiction, corruption, politics, terrorism, fundamentalism, CIA, family crisis and more. The movie requires quite a bit of explanation if you do not grasp it.
Energy as we all know is the numero uno priority of many nations and the world is going to be a radically different place if the current supply of energy is not replaced by the new innovations in geneology or other renewable sources. Yes, geneology. I am as far as you can go from biology but I believe that by modifying and engineering microbes we can certainly solve both global warming and oil crisis at the same time.

Damn the mega dams

As part of my volunteer work with the Boston chapter of Association for India's Development (AID) I handle projects from a NGO in India called Samata. If you are a grassroots activist (or anyone close) concern about tribal welfare and rights or environmental campaigns you would remember the name Samata from the famous Supreme Court judgment in India in 1997 often referred to as the Samata Judgment. After visiting the villages where Samata works and staying there for two days during my two week vacation to India in 2006, I became a greater admirer of the organization and the work they do. I met with the founder and current show runner (Ravi and Bhanu) and had a good chat with them along with some volunteers from Germany at their Visakhapatnam office.

After the school infrastructure project from Samata, I took over the Polavaram Mega Dam project for AID Boston. Mega dams is a global topic and I am still in the process of educating myself on the complexities around a resource management project as big as Polavaram. The Chinese Three Gorges project is the latest example exposing the two sides of the coin. There is a world wide movement around this topic and not much of this is talked about in the main stream media for obvious reasons. I never knew that US has been demolishing mega dams after realizing the "real" after affects of such projects. Many use cases and info here. An academic perspective of the problem can be found here.

I am more convinced about the de-merits of Polavaram project after reading relatively more reliable reports such as this. Though many entities in India are trying to leverage this topic for their own benefit (from political parties such as CPI(M) to established NGOs), I think there might be some real value coming out of the campaigns at the end of the day. Personally, I do not think the project would be called off. It's not practical. Instead, I would be very happy to see the project implemented with proper planning (not executing plans and relying on data dating back to 1985!). Visiting Polavaram and talking with people from the affected villages is high up on my agenda for my next India trip. Until then I have to reply on second hand information. I'll post some slides here after my presentation at AID Boston this month. Did I tell you that it's a three plus billion dollar project?