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Chobi Mela III

Raghu Rai’s exposure of a corporate crime

FayzaHaq
DR1K Gallery has Raghu Rai's photographs of the 1984 Bhopal disaster as a part of Chobi Mela III. There is photograph of a dead child, with open eyes and open mouth, buried in dirt and debris. His entire body is under the stones and rubble and someone's hand is brushing away the dirt from his face. The next picture depicts women and children, with their heads down, crying and lamenting. The parents hold on to the children, while the young ones hang on to their siblings. They all.wear dirty clothes. There is also an old woman with metal jewellery in her ear and wrists and she is in a shirt and salwar. Part of her mouth seems to be worn away with disaster. She is holding her hands to her head and moaning.
There is a hospital scene in which men are holdingontochildrenwhoaresickandinjured.At the back, half a dozen nurses tend to the suffering In another picture we see a sick man with his head tied. His relatives hold a blanket over his chest and knees. A young woman is also included in the people looking after the ailing man. In another picture is an old man covered with layers of blankets, trying to rest and recover. A woman is seen in the next photo in a burqa while her daughter is seen in saluar-kameez. As the girl frowns, the mother wrings her hands in despair. In another there is figure in the bed covered with quilts and sheets. At the back, bricks peep through walls where the white coating is missing. In another there are brooding women in saris and salwar-kameez..
A disturbing photo shows a woman holding up her clothes to reveal a large glaring wound in her stomach that has been stitched. Behind her is a man with a bandaged head, in crutches. Another picture brings in an array of jars containing foetuses. They are lined up in a terrace and behind are minarets of mosques. Another photo brings a
collection of large paper bags containing human skeletons. In the next picture we see an old man being covered with a blanket by one of his relatives. A woman is seen in the next photo putting her arms around an old sick man, probably her father or father- in-law. A gathering of women, young and old, is shown in another photo. They are either standing or sitting and they all look unhappy with the world.
'What I saw was to change my life,' said Raghu Rai. 'It was an unprecedented scene of chaos. What startled me was the silence of death. Thousands of people had already died. Thousands more had died in the 11th September attack on the World TYade Centre. I wanted to show the world what happens to people when corpora-
tions are not held liable for their actions, when they are allowed to cut costs and safety standards.’
The exhibitions offered a unique insight into human and environmental tragedy that engulfed the inland city of Bhopal in December 1984, when an explosion at Union Carbide's plant unleashed lethal gases into the city, causing the world's worst industrial disaster. Photographer Raghu Rai arrived in Bhopal hours after the gas leaked to find chaos as the dead were being buried and cremated, and the hospitals overflowing with thousands of patients. Rai realised he was witnessing a disaster of unprecedented proportions, the start of a long nightmare for the gas exposed survivors.