- "One of the premier historians of our time, Dominique Lapierre is the author of such stirring classics as Is Paris Burning? and The City of Joy. Famed for uncovering
the humanity in historic events, he here joins forces with acclaimed writer Javier Moro. Together they investigate and chronicle each fateful moment counting down to what happened." "Union Carbide
was a huge American corporation whose leaders had only the best intentions. In New York they invented a miracle insecticide. In ancient Bhopal, they formulated the lethal gas needed to produce it and
built a giant plant to process it."
- "But at five past midnight on December 3, 1984, toxic gas leaked out of a pesticide tank. By one-thirty geysers were spitting poison into the night wind. The
apocalypse had begun. Banks of deadly fog filled nearby slums. Lungs burst. Corneas burned. Death would strike in seconds and no one was prepared: neither the bride at her wedding banquet nor the
peasants who came to Bhopal for a better life, nor the shoemaker rousing his neighbors to flee their huts nor the Scottish nun risking all to rescue lost children. By night's end, over half a million
Bhopalis were drowning in pain and chaos, and between 16,000 and 30,000 would die in the worst industrial disaster in history."
Bhopal (//; Hindustani pronunciation: [bʱoːpaːl]) is the capital of the Indian
state of Madhya Pradesh and the administrative
headquarters of Bhopal District and
Bhopal Division. The city was the capital
of the former Bhopal State. Bhopal is known as the City of
Lakes for its various natural as well as artificial lakes and is also one of the greenest cities in India. Bhopal is the 16th largest city in India and 134thlargest city in the world.
It is basically divided into two parts - old Bhopal and new Bhopal.
A Y-class city, Bhopal houses various institutions and installations of national importance. Some of these include ISRO's Master Control Facility, AIIMS Bhopal (Established in 2012), National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) AMPRI, MANIT, IISER, SPA, IIFM, BHEL and NLIU. The city attracted international attention after the Bhopal disaster, when a Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) pesticide manufacturing plant leaked a mixture
of deadly gases including methyl isocyanate on the
intervening night of 2 / 3 December 1984, leading to one of the worst industrial disasters in the world's history. Since then, Bhopal has been a center of protests and campaigns which have been
joined by people from across the globe.