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Improvisation on Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman’s photographs and discussion paper: “Infrastructure Development in Northeast India – Examining Inequality and Exclusion in the Development Promise of Progress and Prosperity”.Anton Nikolotov&#160;is an experimental anthropologist currently completing his PhD at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University Berlin. His research interests are situated at the borders of urban anthropology of migration, critical border research and affect studies.&#160;Skeletal electricity grids— proud monuments of state’s hydropower.168 hydropower dams planned in Arunachal Pradesh for construction in competition with China.1 “Who’s faster”, Mirza asks, rising his hands emphatically “in destroying the region’s water ecologies?”India— "Our Land of Rising Sun" or the Grand OBOR’s Director? © Mirza Zulfiqur RahmanHydrocratic OpiumocracyAct East Policy and Developmental Vision for Better Plutocracy Speculative Prosperity and Private Companies spin around “Compensation hearings”, Gamblings and Opium As State-Corporate Gifts for Communal Complacency They turn the inhabitants into hyper-structural strugglers and logistical pendelers. All the while others simply turn their faces away and ask: “why do the straight lines get so violent or never become the lines when one needs them to?”2 © Mirza Zulfiqur RahmanWhen, in  Arunachal Pradesh , they do materialize as windy highways they only get used by the machinic bestiary of the army. Otherwise they remain empty.Locals say these roads are “pickled”: Not ready for use yet. As the “future roads” pickle, the lines weave and are weaved out of a web of technocratic dreams, rents and little universes of lands, bodies and rivers.© Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman1. See Rahman’s “China and India’s race to dam the Brahmaputra river puts the Himalayas at risk”. https://theconversation.com/china-and-indias-race-to-dam-the-brahmaputra-river-puts-the-himalayas-at-risk-65496↩2. “Bridges and roads in north-east India may drive small tribes away from development” https://theconversation.com/bridges-and-roads-in-north-east-india-may-drive-small-tribes-away-from-development-78636↩