Drilling for greed

I once saw one of the icons of Indian IT industry, a proud son of Mysore who started off with leftist ideals but later inspired tomes for the way he had created millionaire employees through stock options. That evening, he was, like me, looking ever bit as jet-lagged and travel-weary as the other two hundred plus international arrivals struggling to collect their luggage in the pathetic HAL airport arrival area of Bangalore. Mercifully, a couple of years later we started using the new, large and fancy BIAL airport.

And recently I landed at the Beijing Capital International Airport. Immediately, I texted my friend who works at BIAL, "Landed in BCIA. It is 50 times larger than BIAL!"

China boasts a Great Wall built before the Christian era. This is the only man-made object visible to the naked eye from even a satellite. That same nation has built an economy that makes everything from apples to Apples. Also melamine-tainted milk to toxic toys.

The BCIA airport is a million square metres in size, and handles 55 million passengers a year. It also connects everyone to a bustling Beijing city with a ring road 207 km long. The city is teeming with economic activity, but has a major haze problem and smells a lot like a petrol station.

Oil wealth. The one thing China lacks, but makes up by making everything else. And as America looks on with approval at the burgeoning capitalism there, man's greed drives the engine called growth. And that makes some people near the Gulf of Mexico drill 4 km below the sea, and install a pipe 5 km tall to suck out earth's black gold. But short cuts and short-sightedness cause a spill more black than gold. And that triggers a whole chain of crisis stories. What a life! Reminds me of Bhasmaasura!

Read this story about BP in the Economist.