The Reality Tours group offering an all-day guided tour of Mumbai is dedicated to giving back. Eighty percent of their revenues, after expenses and taxes, gets plowed back into the community through an NGO. They work to provide rudimentary education and life skills and strive to better the job opportunities for those who live on government land in illegal structures – what colloquially would be known as “slums.” In Mumbai that means they work within Dharavi, the World’s Third Largest Slum™. They are just behind the Favelas of Rio and Soweto of South Africa. More on Dharavi later.
Chetan was our guide and our driver was… shoot… I missed his name when Chetan introduced us. And he was shy and quiet throughout the day… and we reached the point where we’d spent enough time in traffic that I didn’t feel comfortable saying, “Ya know… I don’t know your name.” I felt like we had gone through too much and I’d seem even worse of a person for not knowing his name. So I played it off… which I’m sure he could tell but was too nice to call me on. I really should just embrace not remembering people’s names. Hell, I have some good friends of mine that I still don’t know what their names are. They know who they are, and that’s all that matters, right?
The first stop of the day was the Gateway to India, a large structure facing the Arabian Sea that would be the final point of departure for the British Armed Forces as India gained her independence. It’s also a departure point for a ferry to a nearby island popular with picnickers and daytrippers, so much so that the line would stretch across the courtyard and snake back and forth amongst the gawking tourists.
Nearby is the famed Taj Mahal Tower Mumbai. It was originally built by a wealthy Parsi industrialist who was denied entry into the posh 4-star Watson Holel as it had a strict “Europeans Only” policy. Jamsetji Tata built a hotel where all would be welcome… and as a result created the first of many companies under the TATA umbrella. A hundred and seventeen years later, TATA is the corporate sponsor of the Mumbai Marathon I’ll be running soon.
The Taj Mahal Tower Mumbai was also where terrorists took hostages in 2008, a tragedy chronicled in the movie “Hotel Mumbai.”
In the nearby public cricket grounds, pockets of clubs and locals were playing “pick up” games of the perhaps 2nd most popular sport in India (field hockey is apparently number 1). The nearby university features a “Little Ben” clock tower, designed by the same guy who made Big Ben in London.
The Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) was renamed from its previous moniker Victoria Terminus in a bid to reclaim national pride and fight against colonialism. I admit, I found it easier to call it Victoria Terminus but to be fair, most locals did too. It’s also why many locals still refer to Mumbai as Bombay.
The CST/Victoria Terminus would be the start line for the marathon in a few days. Chetan and I did our best Bollywood dance pose just outside it to celebrate.
Around the corner from the terminus is City Hall, a building of equally impressive gothic architecture.
No visit to any city in the world would be complete without a stroll through a local market. The Mumbai Bazaar was an ocean of commerce and community. At Chetan’s suggestion, I bought some tasty mango sliced candies and we shared the bag throughout our tour.
I was particularly glad I had watched Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982) before coming here. The Gandhi Musuem featured a series of dioramas that could’ve been the basis of that movie’s script outline. All the highlights from the film were on display in these Marwencol-ian mini-worlds.
Walking the streets of Mumbai, we would eventually come to the Dharavi Community.
Out of respect for residents, we were asked not to take photographs inside the slum of Dharavi. For your reference, it’s where they shot a lot of pre-Millionaire game playing scenes in Slumdog Millionaire. As well, Reality Tours offered us high-res downloads they had taken over the years which I’ll include here.
The reality is, I didn’t WANT to take any photos. When I visited Rio’s Favelas but wound up taking some shots there… but I had a crisis of conscience throughout that tour. It all felt a bit like poverty porn, the exploitation of hardship for… what? My own blog post? My memory of it all? It’s not a particularly pleasant thing to visit the slums of the world, confronting the realities of poverty and the struggle to make ends meet. But at the same time, it’s a necessary reminder that we are all incredibly privileged and spoiled in this world and we should count our blessings.
I’m not sure I can even remotely capture the feelings and emotions of walking through the labyrinthine makeshift structures stacked three stories high, ducking and weaving through the dangling power cables that the local government authorized so Dharavi could have power and be charged for it. The broken concrete blocks covering ditches and water pipes giving way to stacks and stacks of bundled detritus that workers were busily sorting and disassembling by hand, shredding plastic in large machines that later would be boiled down into a large sheet and cut up into plastic pellets, those pellets then resold to form secondary recycled products like cell phone cases, remotes, etc. Due to chemical processes and pollution concerns, the recycled pellets could NOT be used for plastic water bottles or children’s toys, but lawn chairs and remote controls – those are possible.
The whole area had a smelting workshop meets a pack of hoarders’ houses. Bundles were stacked waist high or at times overflowing out of multi-story corrugated sheet metal buildings. The whirr of welding machine parts intermixed with the ever present cacophony of commerce – Dharavi is a city unto itself, a city within Mumbai. There are many slums within the Mumbai city limits and over half of Mumbai’s 20.8 million people live in those slums; a million in Dharavi alone. Politicians periodically court the “slum vote” and also recognized that if they take too draconian actions to try and “clean up” the slums, they risk losing a substantial voting block. Still, the SRA (Slum Rehabilitation Authority) has built several high rises on the edge of the slum areas trying to get people to give up their homes in the slum area and move to these “projects.” Some tenants in those apartments like the change; those from Dharavi are not as they feel isolated in those towers, losing their sense of community and their livelihoods, such as they are, that they had in the slum proper. As well, generations have grown in those slums – there’s a rooted sense of place and home even if it may not be the Ritz Carlton.
From the commercial district of Dharavi, we made our way to the residential area. There was still commerce and stalls within this section, but not the mass-marketed efforts of slumlords using teams of manual labor for manufacturing or business. There were a lot more home-grown industries here amongst the homes of residents. Some homes are no more than 15 square feet and house up to 7 people. Curtains and bedsheets cover entrance ways as doors and ladders are strewn about or welded onto the sides of buildings to allow multi-floor access/habitation. Children roam, some playing cricket in the narrow confines of alleys between the chicken-wire and plastered houses. I kept my eyes down for a lot of the walk here, unable to shake the sense that I was there as a tourist seeing how the “other half” lives. Guilt over actions and perceptions rose within me. I wasn’t scared – I felt perfectly safe and Chetan actually grew up here before recently moving out of town; he commutes 2 hours each way by train to come in and work as a tour guide for Reality Tours. Hearing the stories though and seeing the faces of residents making do, living in and indeed carving out happiness in squalor, left me rattled.
It was a Saturday so we couldn’t visit the NGO school in the middle of Dharavi. But we heard about the efforts of the NGO to give back to the community through the tours and various sponsorships – The India Times is a major corporate sponsor, and as I said earlier, 80% of the Reality Tours profits get put back into the local economy/services. I want to believe it was a good thing that we toured here. I want to believe that it is a necessary thing to see what the world’s citizens face, that the disparity between rich and poor is not only massive but juxtaposed within footsteeps. Before entering Dharavi, we stopped to gawk at the richest man in India’s $2 billion dollar (US Dollar!) home. It’s 27 stories tall, has military armed escorts outside, employs a staff of 200+, and has an entire floor that apparently always simulates a snow storm. This building is right next door to a slum. This is the world we live in. And who is to say the guy who blew 2 billion on that house isn’t allowed to do that? Management works hard too, don’t get me wrong. Given my many years in management I can tell you it’s a tough racket and you’re always being told you’re doing something wrong – do too much for the employees and your boss and shareholders/the board complains you’re “not doing right by your fiduciary obligations.” Swing too far toward that though and you’re accused by your team of “exploiting your workers.” Still, $2 billion is a bit much – there’s enjoying the fruits of your labors and then there’s ostentatious displays of ego. MY two cents… which is just 1 billion, nine hundred ninety nine million, nine hundred ninety nine thousand, nine hundred ninety nine dollars and ninety-eight cents less than this “house”:
I’m not saying anything profound or new here, not even remotely scratching the service of the thoughts and feelings I had walking Dharavi. The one thing though I want to try and convey here is that I am incredibly lucky to be where I am in my life, fortunate in having the freedom both physically and financially, to enjoy my life. I don’t always succeed at that enjoyment, caught up in the hurly burly of life. I am after all only human and it’s human to be selfish. But it’s also human to be reflective and to be selfless – when visiting places like this, I do try and make a conscious effort to do and be better in the future. But as everybody who resolved to workout more at the turn of the calendar to January 1st can tell you, sometimes we don’t always keep to our resolutions.
Nonetheless, I donated a few extra rupees and dollars the Reality Gives NGO. If you’re feeling so inclined, I encourage you to do something locally wherever you live to help those in need. Canned food drives, clothing drives, goodwill projects, etc. Like me you may feel overwhelmed and not even sure your contribution will do much to change anything; but if you’re also like me, you’ll realize that if A LOT of us make a small contribution, it grows into a very, very big force for change.
From the slum tour we wandered through a local park filled with nursery rhymes and laughing, smiling children. I was quite taken with the Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe and was excited to go up inside it… until I GoogleTranslated the signs and was told it was for 12 and younger. Aw, phooey.
We capped the tour with a visit to Dhobi Ghat, the famed open air laundromat that provided cleaning services for British soldiers… and still provide commercial cleaning services to this day. With only a hand-written ticket tracking system, clothes and linens come in and are washed and sorted and returned with an accuracy rate that is virtually unparalleled. Our guide tells me he has never heard of a single item going missing or being sent to the wrong customer. I find this slightly suspect as empirically I think we have all proven socks go missing all the time — how many singles do I have in my dresser that long for their lost matching twin?
It was a typical ride back to our hotel in Mumbai traffic — take any time estimate and double it for getting some place. Still, we made it back in time for the sunset along the water. I look like I was auditioning for the rogues gallery of a Dick Tracy reboot — “I’ll be reading for the part of Prune Face… I can save you a fortune on makeup prosthetics!”
