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HUNTING DOWN WATER IN INDIA: IN SEARCH OF VOX POPS
Sanjay Barnela and Vasant Saberwal; Poems by Maya Khosla
‘The third world war will be a war over water’, proclaims Chattar Singh, a farmer, standing on his plot of land in the desolation of Ramgarh in Jaisalmer district, in Rajasthan. We grapple with knots in the audio cable in a futile effort to get our camera rolling in time to catch his sound bites. This was 2002, and we were shooting for a five-part series of video documentaries on ‘The Politics of Water’. Always in search of such vox pops (vox populi), we roll the camera while Chattar Singh solemnly relates his story.
The diminutive farmer tells us how he, his kin and numerous others like him have been reduced to penury because they believed ...
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