Mumbai

8/3/13

I arrived in Mumbai four days days ago, and it is every bit as nuts and intense as I thought it would be. Mumbai is a huge city, packed to the gills with about 20 million people. The City proper, with about 12 million people, is the fourth most populous in the world and it shows. The sidewalks (where there are sidewalks) are very crowded. People often walk in the street only because there are so many people already on the sidewalk. The trains, however, are the best place to get a glimpse of how crowded Mumbai really is.

The doors on the trains don’t close. They get so crowded that people hang out sides, out of the door. At rush hour, you are packed in like sardines. It takes a certain skill to ride the train here. The trains only stop at each station for about 20 to 30 seconds, so at every stop there is mad rush to board the train. People don’t wait for people to exit the train, they just get on, so unless there are many other people getting off at your stop you kind of have to push and shove your way off the train. Even if the train is not crowded or busy, people still rush and push to get on the train.  About two stops before you get off, you have to start to push and shove your way towards the door so you will be able to get off when the train is crowded. But this presents another problem. Sometimes, the platform is on the right, and at other times it is on the left. Experienced riders know which side their stop is on, but I don’t. I’ve already missed my stop a couple times because I didn’t know which side the platform was on. The trains have four different types of cars. The regular cars are “second class”. This is just normal service. Then there is “first class”, which costs more, has slightly more comfortable seats, and tends to be a little less crowded, which is why people pay more for it. Then, there is a car for disabled folks, and generally one or two whole cars just for women. There is real problem in Mumbai with ladies getting groped and harassed on trains. In addition, many women don’t want to be packed right up against some dudes body when the train is crowded.

Mumbai was once seven different island cities. During colonial rule, the British reclaimed vast amounts of land, making one continuous city. Mumbai is peninsular, and the central city (or South Mumbai, as it is called) is toward the tip of this peninsula. As the city grew, it grew northward. Mumbai is kind of oriented length-wise, with the Western line of the Mumbai metro serving as the backbone of urban growth. The train tracks create a kind of barrier, and the only way across them are purpose built elevated walkways and bridges for cars every few miles or so. Many parts of the city are split between east and west by the tracks, for example there is Bandra East and Bandra West, Andheri East and Andheri West, etc. In many parts of the city, which side of the tracks you are on makes a big difference. Bandra West is a very expensive and stylish part of town, while Bandra east, on the other side of the tracks, is industrial and impoverished. In one area called Mahim, on the west side of tracks is a normal neighborhood, while on the east side of the tracks is the huge Dharavi slum.

A couple of days ago, I took a tour of the Dharavi slum. A company called Reality Tours and Travel will, for a small fee, take tourists like myself on a guided tour of the slum (don’t worry, I understand the irony of paying money to gawk at people’s poverty). Reality tours is a fairly benevolent organization, giving 80% of their profits to social programs that support those living in the slum. The tour through the slum was perhaps the biggest reality check I’ve ever experienced. Once Asia’s largest slum, Dharavi is certainly one of the densest, and is most interesting because of the sheer amount of economic activity that goes on there. The slum is generally divided between a commercial and industrial area, and a residential area. The residential area is further split between a Hindu area and a Muslim area. All through the slum, as one might imagine, the streets are extremely narrow and unpaved. It was raining on the day of my tour, so we had to trek through tiny muddy streets. In the industrial area, there is all kinds of activity going on. By far the largest industry in Dharavi is plastic recycling. People from the slum go throughout the entire city and collect discarded plastic, from water bottles and yogurt containers to broken chairs. Back at the slum, they separate the plastic based on quality. The plastic is then sold to people who crush the plastic into tiny bits. The plastic is crushed using large metal crushing machines that are all made and assembled right in the slum. Walking through the narrow lanes, you can clearly smell the fumes of metal being melted and molded to make the crushers. The streets are so narrow that the smoke and the fumes have nowhere to escape, and it can often be suffocating. There is also a large leather industry in the slum, where they make purses, wallets, and other leather goods.

The residential area is even denser than the commercial area. Families generally have about 100 square feet of space to call their own, and it is often shared by 4 or more people. To walk through the streets, you have to crouch down a bit to avoid hitting the bare, open electricity wires above. Amazingly, most houses have access to electricity and water, but only for a few hours a day. Our guide warned us not to stop moving as we might stop the flow of movement in the narrow lanes, and to stay close, because the streets are so dense that if we get lost, it is very difficult to find your way out without knowing exactly where you are going. From the residential area, we walked out onto a large, baseball diamond sized heap of garbage. The vast area was muddy, smelly, and filled trash.

Next to the heap of trash, there were a group of children playing badminton and cricket and this was the part that struck me most. In the slum, everyone is doing something. People are relentlessly working, trying to make a living, children are playing, and mothers are cooking. Everyone there was making the best of what they had. The only open space the children had was next to this big pile of garbage, so that’s where they played. I’m not trying to say it’s okay or excusable, but I am saying that it put my privilege in perspective. I don’t think I will ever forget that.