Kodaikanal one of Asia’s mercury hotspots: Ameer Shahul

In August 2015, a young rapper, Sofia Ashraf, released a music video on an unlikely theme: mercury poisoning in the pristine hill town of Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu. Clean up your mess,” went the rap ‘Kodaikanal Won’t’, which has been viewed over 4 million times over the last eight years, bringing to global attention one of India’s biggest environmental disasters. Now, a former journalist and Greenpeace campaigner, Ameer Shahul, stitches together the story of mercury poisoning in the popular tourist destination in his new book Heavy Metal: How a Global Corporation Poisoned Kodaikanal. Excerpts from an interview: Why is it important to document the Kodaikanal mercury poisoning incident today, seven years after Unilever announced a compensation package for its ex-workers? Today, Kodaikanal remains one of Asia’s mercury hotspots, as recent research shows.