The Bhopal disaster, also referred to as the Bhopal gas tragedy, was a gas leak incident on the night of 2–3 December 1984 at the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India. It is considered among the world's worst industrial disasters. Over 500,000 people were exposed to methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas. The highly toxic substance made its way into and around the small towns located near the plant.
Bharati Mukherjee was an Indian American-Canadian writer and professor emerita in the department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the author of a number of novels and short story collections, as well as works of nonfiction.
Jaya Bachchan is an Indian film actress, politician and a member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha from the Samajwadi Party, notably serving four terms since 2004. She is particularly known for reinforcing a natural style of acting in both mainstream and "middle-of-the-road" cinema. During her career, she won nine Filmfare Awards: including three for Best Actress and three for Best Supporting Actress. She was awarded the Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007. In 1992, she was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India.
Gillian Honorine Mary Herbert, Baroness Hemingford,, known professionally as Jill Paton Walsh, was an English novelist and children's writer. She may be known best for her Booker prize-nominated novel Knowledge of Angels and the Peter Wimsey–Harriet Vane mysteries that have completed and continued the work of Dorothy L. Sayers.
Raghunath Rai Chowdhry, known as Raghu Rai, is an Indian photographer and photojournalist. He was a protégé of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who appointed Rai, then a young photojournalist, to Magnum Photos in 1977.
Amulya Malladi is an author. She earned her bachelor's degree in electronics engineering from Osmania University, Hyderabad, India and her masters degree in journalism from the University of Memphis, Tennessee, United States.
The International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (ICJB) is a coalition of disaster survivors and environmental, social justice, progressive Indian, and human rights groups that have joined forces to hold the Indian Government and Dow Chemical Corporation accountable for the ongoing chemical disaster in Bhopal.
Indra Sinha is a British writer of Indian and English descent. Animal's People, his most recent novel, was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize and winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Europe and South Asia.
Animal's People is a novel by Indra Sinha. It was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize and is the Winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize: Best Book From Europe & South Asia. Sinha's narrator is a 19-year-old orphan of Khaufpur, born a few days before the 1984 Bhopal disaster, whose spine has become so twisted that he must walk on all fours. Ever since he can remember, he has gone on all fours. Known to every-one simply as Animal, he rejects sympathy, spouts profanity and obsesses about sex. He lives with a crazy old French nun called Ma Franci, and his dog Jara. Also, he falls in love with a local musician's daughter, Nisha.
Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain is a 2014 Indian English-language historical drama film directed by Ravi Kumar. Based on the Bhopal disaster that happened in India on 2–3 December 1984, the film stars Martin Sheen, Mischa Barton, Kal Penn, Rajpal Yadav, Tannishtha Chatterjee and Fagun Thakrar. Benjamin Wallfisch composed the film's music. Kumar's idea for making a film based on the Bhopal disaster came after he read a book about it. Shot over a period of 18 months, it was originally scheduled for a late 2010 release. However, the lack of responses from distributors kept delaying the release.
Jennifer Natalya Fink is an American author working in experimental feminist and queer fiction. She is best known for her novels Burn, V, and The Mikvah Queen, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. Her novel, Bhopal Dance (2018), won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize in 2017.
Rashida Bee is an Indian activist from Bhopal. She was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2004, together with Champa Devi Shukla. The two have struggled for justice for the surviving victims of the 1984 Bhopal disaster, when 20,000 people were killed, and organized campaigns and trials against those responsible for the disaster.
Champa Devi Shukla is an Indian activist from Bhopal. She was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2004, together with Rashida Bee. Shukla and Bee have struggled for justice for those who survived the 1984 Bhopal disaster, when 20,000 people were killed, and organized campaigns and trials against the responsible company and its owners.
Polar the Titanic Bear is a children's book written by Margaretta "Daisy" Corning Spedden. Spedden was an American heiress who survived the sinking of the Titanic, and her account of her family's trip and the eventual disaster, written as a tale to amuse her seven-year-old son, was published about 45 years after her death. The story is told from the point of view of a Teddy Bear.
Geeta Mukherjee was an Indian politician and social worker and a four times MLA from Panskura Purba, from 1967 to 1977. As a Member of Parliament, she was elected seven times from the Panskura constituency, from 1980 to 2000, in the Indian state of West Bengal being a Communist Party of India (CPI) candidate. She also remained the president of National Federation of Indian Women, women's wing of Communist Party of India. She led the demand for the legislature of 1/3rd reservation for women in parliamentary elections in India.
Rachna Dhingra is a social activist working in Bhopal with the survivors of the Bhopal gas tragedy, a gas leak from a Union Carbide plant in 1984 that has killed 20,000 people. She is also currently a member of the Aam Aadmi Party of India.
Meenakshi Mukherjee was a litterateur and Sahitya Akademi Award winner. Her book, "An Indian for all seasons", a biography of historian R.C. Dutt, published by Penguin, was to be released in Delhi. Mukherjee received the Sahitya Akademi award in 2003 for her book The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English. She taught English literature and Critical theory at a number of colleges in Patna, Pune, Delhi and University of Hyderabad. Her last and longest spell was as Professor of English in the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She was a visiting professor in several universities outside India, including the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Chicago, the University of California at Berkeley, Macquarie University (Sydney), the University of Canberra and Flinders University (Adelaide). Her husband Sujit Mukherjee, was teacher and a literary scholar. They had two daughters. They lived the final years of their lives in Hyderabad.
Lalit Shastri is an Indian journalist, columnist, wildlife film maker, birder, and environmentalist. He has headed the Madhya Pradesh Bureau of The Hindu and The Asian Age - two of India's leading English newspapers - for more than two decades. He quit a corporate job to investigate the causes leading to the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster and subsequently became a full-time journalist. He has extensively covered from ground zero for The Hindu, the riots that followed the demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya and repeated attacks by Naxalite-Maoists in the Central Indian States of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh.
The Remember Bhopal Museum is a museum in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India that commemorates the Bhopal disaster. It collects and exhibits artifacts and records of the affected communities. The museum was opened on 2 December 2014, the 30th anniversary of the disaster.
Ankhi Mukherjee is an academic specialising in Victorian and Modern English literature, critical theory and postcolonial and world literature. In 2015, she was appointed a Professor of English and World Literatures by the University of Oxford.
