Discussions on mining in India over the past 20 years are liable to produce fatigue. The names of places, companies, tribes, forests, states, regions, rivers and hills flit lazily and incoherently in and out of our ears including Jagdalpur, POSCO, Reddy brothers, Niyamgiri and Vedanta. The steady trickle of news about mining-afflicted areas – always remote, always misty, always in the 'under-developed' parts of the country – has both kept us saturated with factoids, and somehow also crushed our ability to connect, think straight and act. Everybody, that is, except those directly facing the prospect of seeing their farm, hill, house or river imploding into a cavernous mine pit below, and clouds of dust above. These are the Grimm's fairy tales of contemporary India, with an added postmodern twist. They seem to have no beginning – we can't seem to remember a time before mining; no clear middle – what is happening now, has it stopped or resumed?; and no clear end – aren't the displaced communities going to be rehabilitated with the usual package of primary school-dispensary-jobs, and isn't this enough?
Hartman de Souza's Eat Dust: Greed and mining in Goa gives us the full context. He shows us how to see the story in the midst of the deafening hum of news bytes. It reminds us that 'information', reports and a couple of interviews from opposing sides of the mining 'debate' that are filtered through to Delhi or Bombay do not by themselves make a narrative. And this is not because there is no narrative. There is a beginning, there is a middle, and we are all living through the end. The end of a sustainable, non-polluting, non-exploitative way of living. A form of life that is as 'natural' as it is 'human', a life that does not need Goa holidays and spa resorts to counter its sophistry and meaninglessness.