Day 1

Zindaâe(TM)bad! This expression is the Indian equivalent of Viva!

There was a lot of celebrating going down as hundreds of groups marched in the main gate of the World Social Forum grounds with their banners, flyers and slogans.

The opening ceremonies began with a rocking Pakistani band named Junoon. The Indian and Pakistani governments may be fighting with each other, but here on the ground, most WSF delegates seemed to know the words and sang along enthusiastically with the group.

After an energetic dance performance by the South African Siwele Sonke Dance theatre, the welcoming speeches began. Shanti Patel, septuagenarian head of the reception committee and a former mayor ofMumbai, told the cheering crowd that he believed we would succeed increating another world by the end of this century, and welcomed us to what he called this working class city, “built by textile workers” — another irony, as this week, the permanent closure of several Mumbai textile factories and toss of tens of thousands of jobs was announced.

This is a country that honours its elders: next to speak was a former military captain from Indiaâe(TM)s war of independence, now 90. Lakshmi Sehgal noted that we are now fighting another kind of imperialism, and this time, the enemy is invisible. She noted that corporate-led globalization is especially hard on women, threatening womenâe(TM)s struggle for equality from all sides.

One surprise on the agenda was an address by Indian writer and keyspokesperson for the anti-corporate globalization movement, Arundhati Roy.

Roy challenged the crowd to move beyond the rhetoric of anti-globalization and take concrete action. She proposed that all progressive groups should focus on the war on Iraq, identifying the multinationals that are profiting from the misery-causing U.S. occupation of the country, such as Halliburton, Enron and Arthur Anderson. She favours an action against their operations world wide as a way to make protest effective.

Earlier in the day, the Grassroots Global Justice delegation, numberingmore than 100 activists based mainly in the U.S., as well as some LatinAmericans and Canadians, discussed trade union issues with two leadersfrom Indiaâe(TM)s New Union initiative. Brother Subbu explained that there is a difference between union organizing based in communities. Both favour efforts by unions to organize in unorganized sectors, starting with where workers live. It was pointed out that while eight per cent of Indian workers are members of unions, only half of these actually benefit from collective bargaining. Indian law badly needs reform to extend basic labour protections to temporary and contract workers, as well as those in the informal sector. Brother Subbu believes that the presence of the WSF in India has pushed the right-wing government to at least put labour law reform on the legislative agenda.

And that was just Day One! The panels on war, land, water and food sovereignty, media and culture, and labour are next.

Day Two

We caught a bus from our hotel to the Forumsite. Walking down the roadways was a challenge because of the largenumber of informal delegations marching, dancing and playing their drums in informal parades along the way. We caught a veryinteresting panel chaired by Canada’s own water guru, Tony Clarke, of the Polaris Institute. The panel members from Pakistan, the U.S., Colombia, Europe and India were reporting on their discussions at the large-scale People’s World Water Forum that took place in New Delhi earlier in the week.

The World Bank and IMF are making loans to developing countriescontingent upon their allowing huge corporations like Suez and Vivendi to buy up public water distribution services in countries around the world. In industrialized countries like Canada, municipal governments are using the fact that they are underfunded as a reason to say we need to let these private companies come in and “manage” our municipal water utilities.

In the last three years there has been an upsurge in corporate take-over attempts. These giants are now into “water mining.” As they extract huge amounts of clean water from aquifers for bottling, the residents in the area find their own wells drying up or becoming polluted. Water is likely to be one of the issues of the next decade. The slogan on the advocacy organization’s flyer was, “Your pee is safer to drink than the drinking water of more than one billion people.” Not a pleasant thought.

When we went to the food tents for lunch, we met a 14-year-old boy fromBhutan who has been living in a refugee camp in Nepal since he was two. The camps are very rudimentary, and Bhutanese housed there are notallowed to work or find permanent housing. The situation in monarch-ruled Bhutan is not very good either, but the refugees need a home. There is a big contingent of Bhutanese pressing their claims here at the Forum.

We ducked into a workshop on trafficking of women and children andglobalization, mainly to get out of the mid-day heat. But it turned out to be very interesting. The focus of discussion was on women’s male relatives in South Asia selling women and children into slavery, where most end up in prostitution. About 12 per cent of Indian prostitutes are children, and almost 7,000 Nepali children are kidnapped and sold as prostitutes every year. The rates of HIV/AIDS are alarming. The prevalence of cell phones in urban centres in South Asia apparently makes it easier for pimps to find their customers. There is also a lot of cross-border trade in slaves.

There is a great film hall here, with two screens going non-stop. We saw a film about South African activist Dennis Brutus, a man in his 70s who is actually staying in our hotel with the Grassroots Global Justice delegation. The documentary explains how he engineered the boycott of South Africa at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. He was a sports writer who saw a way to start the public humiliation of the apartheid regime, starting on the playing field. Brutus was also in jail with Nelson Mandela, but now criticizes the South African government for not doing enough to deal with the AIDS crisis and allowing segregation to remain in place.

Following that was the Mumbai premiere of the new Canadian documentarycalled The Corporation. Billed as a sequel to Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, the film has now in opened in Toronto and Vancouver. The film shows how corporations have been given the same rights in law as natural persons, but are modelled on the psychopath type of human — lying, breaking laws and social norms, hurting others knowingly and unable to form enduring relationships! The film has some very touching moments and some very funny lines. Go see it! At the end of the film, Arundhati Roy stood up and reiterated her challenge to Forum delegates to keep the discussions going, but not at the expense of ignoring action. The corporations that are profiting from the misery in Iraq need to feel our indignation. According to Roy, we should pick some targets, and “this is where we should stage our next battle.”

Mumbai is hot and dusty. We are constantly amazed by the beautiful bright colours in the clothes worn by Indians, and there is a lot of music in the streets of the Forum site. At the end of the long day, we sit down in the hotel restaurant to swap stories with other Canadian and trade union delegates — and then I come to the hotel’s internet connection site to post these notes from the WSF 2004.

Day Three

There is so much going on here! It’s like the story of the blind men and the elephant — ask ten WSF participants what is going on here at the WSF and you will get ten different answers. Or, you could ask the elephant. There was one standing by the entrance to the site when we walked by. A fellow perched on top of the animal was calmly unfurling a sign calling for arms control. His group was planning to use the elephant in a march later on raising awareness about production of major weapons as well as small arms.

I was in a different march at lunch time. This one was to publicize the international campaign against Coca Cola products that was launched last July. The campaign is now focusing on Colombia, where company-paid paramilitaries have been killing union leaders and activists at the Coca-Cola bottling plants, and India, where the company has not only bought up most of the major local brands but is mining so much water that local residents don’t have anything left in their wells.

This is definitely India. As the parade wove in and around areas where delegates were having lunch or lounging in the shade, three women in front of me deftly slipped out of the parade and squatted down in front of a building wall. They gathered up their saris and peed right there, all very modestly managed, no big deal at all. As for me, I have solved the problem of urination entirely by sweating out every drop of liquid I consume.

At the anti-Coke march, I met a few of the activists from Kerala state in southern India. I told one of them, named Geojos, that I hoped to visit Kerala. Welcome, he said, with a huge smile, and then invited me and my partner to attend an international conference on water issues happening next week very near the bottling plant in Plashimada. We plan to go, as we have been looking for contacts in Kerala. We are interested to visit this region where decades of popular activism and pro-people governments have led to a relatively high standard of living in this region where people are poor in cash, but highly educated and in good health due to socialized programs.

In the morning, the trade union workshop on privatization of publicservices and unions’ fight back was very interesting. Workshops are held in makeshift spaces defined by huge amounts of cloth. Rough ground is covered with burlap, and the walls and even the ceilings of these workshop rooms are made of cotton muslin. Most of the people attending the session were Indian union activists from the New Trade Union Initiative. The panel discussion proceeded a bit slowly, as there was translation into Spanish and Hindi. I did the Spanish, and left the Hindi to union leader Ashim Roy.

Hilary Wainwright of the British activist magazine Red Pepper told of asuccessful campaign to keep telephone service and home care public in the city of Newcastle. The key was to involve the community and especially the users in the campaign, while maintaining usual union tactics such as work actions to persuade the government that public services were more efficient than private ones. They also used public consultation and consultation with workers to improve the quality of the services.

Robin Alexander from the U.S. told of a less successful attempt to use the labour side agreements of NAFTA to press the Mexican labour authorities to protect workers’ health and safety in U.S.-owned plants, as well as raising the issue of basic union rights, such as free association and the right to a secret ballot vote. As she and another panelist explained, the existence of mechanisms like the NAFTA side agreements and the OECD guidelines for corporate conduct are positive if they raise issues, but they have no teeth. Members of the audience agreed that it’s fine to have international mechanisms, but they are no substitute for good old fashioned struggle of workers for their rights.

When you need to take a break from the panels, you can always check outthe exhibits in the many halls. There are numerous crafts made out oforganic and recycled products, and you can even buy a stationary bicycle to light up your house. Just by pedaling for one hour, you can light a room for three hours. As well, there are visual art exhibits from countries around the world.

And when it all gets too intense, you hop into an autorickshaw and head for your hotel. An autorickshaw is a three-wheeled motorbike encased in a shell with a hard top and no sides. It holds two, and you sit back while your driver honks his way across the highway that has some indeterminate number of lanes and then through unbelievably narrow streets thronging with pedestrian traffic. And when you get to your hotel, there’s a beer. It goes down incredibly well when it’s 35 in the shade.