Brendan in Bombay: John's Take on the Slums

I was introduced to the Indian mindset immediately upon arriving in Mumbai. Pat would be staying in the hotel hosting the conference he was attending and had a courtesy car and driver waiting as we exited the airport. When I climbed into the back seat, I noticed two half empty water bottles in the cup holders obviously leftover from the previous passengers, so mentioned it to the driver. He took them from me, opened the window and casually tossed them out. Welcome to India.

India is a country of great contrasts.

Mounds of trash everywhere… people barely surviving in slums and on sidewalks…cars, motor bikes and trucks competing with camel drawn carts and three wheel cabs weaving through traffic…vehicles driving on the wrong side of the road…cows, pigs and feral dogs roaming the streets…beggars…polluted water. Question any of it and the answer is always the same….with a shrug of the shoulders, “it’s India”.

Yet India is also certainly great beauty, architecture, technology, history, wealth, and hard working, industrious, friendly people speaking one or more of eighteen officially recognized languages, each of those with a myriad of dialects.

Great contrasts indeed.

We felt the greatest contrast first hand on our first full day in Mumbai with two polar opposite experiences. A morning tour of one of the cities’ largest slums, then later an afternoon refreshment in the glorious 7 star Taj Hotel across from the Gateway of India and the Mumbai Harbor. Ah, India.

Our tour through the Dharavi slum was, for me, the most fascinating day of the trip. There is no avoiding the poor in Mumbai, the slums and homeless are all-pervasive. In just about every section of the city there are homeless people of all ages - dirty and unkempt, living on the pavements in shanties of canvas, plastic and cardboard, begging on street corners and knocking on car windows at most traffic lights. But between the obvious “have and have-nots” there is a third Mumbai - the Mumbai of the hard-working poor.

The Dharavi slum (one of many in Mumbai) is said to contain one million people in an area of less than one square mile. Men, women and children working long hours in plastic recycling as well as small-scale industries that produce embroidered garments, leather goods, soaps and pottery. The living conditions are something a westerner could never understand. Small (10 x 10) huts side by side for blocks, stacked two high, most with no windows, a curtain for a door, no bathroom facility, a hose for water and containing an extended family of 4 to 8 people (many, many children)…with another row of neighbors in an identical layout across the 3 foot wide walkway. The walkways are a wet, muddy mess as the buckets of water used for washing and cooking are tossed out the door when done. Most do have electricity and a quick peek through open doorways showed TVs and even a few refrigerators. I will leave it to you to imagine the

permeating odors of the entire area, especially when piles of trash are burning nearby.

We met our “Reality Tour” guides at the railway station for the walk over the tracks to Dharavi and discovered there were twenty or so other tourists from around the globe who were also intent on experiencing this important side of Indian culture. Tourists unlike the many bus loads of people you encounter throughout India who buy a luxury package tour to be shielded from anything that's too "real” and rarely encounter any locals beyond shop keepers and waiters. We witnessed many of the people hard at work in brutal conditions and I wondered why they don’t leave the expensive city and move to the “country” area of farms and small towns to make a better life. I was told that most are resigned to the fact that this is their lot in life, this is what and where they were born in to and they accept that and work hard to make the best of it. Many of the families have lived here for generations.

Dharavi is best summed up in a quote I read recently in a blog discussing the ethics of slum tours: “To me, this place dispels the myth that poverty is due to laziness — that the poor somehow deserve their lot in life because they are lazy or stupid or otherwise lacking in some important character trait that the successful possess. Dharavi is a resounding rebuttal to that belief.”