Shalini Kantayya: Who Controls Water Controls Life
By Vasiliki Eugenis
Editor’s Note
Shalini Kantayya is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, eco-activist, and educator who’s passionate about using storytelling to get to the heart of human rights issues. A self-professed sci-fi geek, she’s fixated on new technologies and their impact on the near future. She runs her own production company, 7th Empire, and has been a TED Fellow, Sundance Fellow, Fulbright Scholar, and finalist on FOX’s reality T.V. show On the Lot.
It’s easy to see why she’s gained such widespread recognition. Whether it’s exploring the alien nature of school lunches or profiling a sustainable ocean farmer, Kantayya blends boldness and vulnerability in her narratives to expose harsh truths. You can’t look away — and you don’t want to.
Her 2012 short sci-fi film, A Drop of Life, is Kantayya’s commentary on the continual failure of water systems in India where well-intentioned projects from the West abound. It is also what happens when water is no longer treated as sacred but entirely as a commercial endeavor. (The film is available on Netflix and IndieFlix.)
By showing the impact of the water crisis on the day-to-day of those most affected, A Drop of Life sets out to reclaim water as a fundamental human right. It is a foreboding tale of what the future may hold if we’re not careful. In Kantayya’s view, the circumstances are dire.
A Drop of Life begins innocently enough. It opens with a mother and daughter fetching water from a well in Kutch, India. (See “The ‘Dream’ of School for Impoverished Girls in Little Rann of Kutch, by Photojournalist Nikki Kahn“) The daughter, Devi, is late to school. She runs to a tree to join her classmates gathered around a schoolteacher named Mira telling a story about a greedy man who tears apart a chicken for its golden eggs. The scene is full of laughter and color and warmth.
Across the world in New York City we are introduced to Nia, an African-American corporate executive who is responsible for a prepaid water meter project that will be installed in the village where Devi and Mira live. Nia is exhausted and anxious; we quickly come to see why the project weighs on Nia’s conscience.
Kantayya’s choice of characters in A Drop of Life is deliberate. Again and again we hear how women of color all over the world are disproportionately affected by the global water crisis. In India alone, where water is celebrated and revered, a rural woman walks a staggering 14,000 km per year on average to collect water.
A Drop of Life forces us to confront what a statistic like this really means. Numbers are given a name, a history, a loss.
As the film continues, money on the meter runs out and the pump dries up. Sickness abounds. Nia travels to Kutch to check up on the project and faints upon learning that Devi has died. Nia, too, shares a deep ancestral connection to water — she has a vision of she and her grandmother in a river, evoking an African-American tradition of outdoor baptisms. It is this moment where Nia and Mira become intimately linked through their shared histories of water as a sacred, life-giving force.
In her visit to our class on “Artists, Social Change, and the Role of Journalism” at New York University this Spring, Kantayya shared more about her current focus on the clean energy economy with her new film, Catching the Sun. But water still remains an important issue for her. In the interview below, NYU student and young arts activist Vasiliki Eugenis spoke with Kantayya about the connection between water and privilege, how A Drop of Life is used as tool for activism worldwide, and what we’re not talking about when it comes to water, but should be.
— Celeste Hamilton Dennis, Editor
