Living in filth is no lifestyle choice

Last week Prince Charles came out gushing about Bombay’s slums, idolising the city’s biggest shanty town, Dharavi, as a development model for the world. The future King of England, I thought, has definitely lost it this time.
The prince was addressing a conference organised by his Foundation for the Built Environment, a charity that attempts to involve locals in the redesign of slum areas. Speaking to a gathering of planners, charity workers and government officials in the luxurious environs of St James’s Palace in London, the prince said that Dharavi, which featured in the hit film Slumdog Millionnaire, is an inspiration to wealthier parts of the world. ‘I strongly believe that the West has much to learn from societies and places which, while sometimes poorer in material terms, are infinitely richer in the ways in which they live and organise themselves as communities’, he said.
Charles’s veneration of Dharavi, as if it holds the secret to a unique and spiritually superior lifestyle, not only reflects a complete rejection of development for those impoverished people who still aspire to it - it also reeks of ignorance and a backward romanticisation of poverty. This prince, brought up in the lap of luxury, somehow imagines that quaint, poor Indians are predisposed to living in filth.
According to Charles, the Dharavi slum dwellers’ use of local materials, the district’s walkable neighbourhoods, and its mix of employment and housing, add up to ‘an underlying intuitive grammar of design that is totally absent from the faceless slab blocks that are still being built around the world to “warehouse” the poor’.
An intuitive grammar of design? Charles is clearly on a fantastic trip. Perhaps someone spiked his lassi on his visit to the Bombay slums. In Dharavi, which is located in the heart of Bombay, over 600,000 people are crammed in to just over 500 acres of space that lacks decent civic amenities. They live there because they do not have any better alternative – like living in those ‘faceless slab blocks’, for example, that the prince so derides.
As one report points out: ‘Dharavi is an extremely dense environment. A recent survey by the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture (KRVIA) established that a central area of Dharavi (Chamra Bazaar) contained densities of up to 336,643 people per square kilometre! Assuming a population of 700,000, the population density in Dharavi would be around 314,887 per square kilometre. This is 11 times as dense as Mumbai as a whole (the most densely populated city in the world, with 29,500 people per square kilometre) and more than six times as dense as daytime Manhattan (about 50,000 people per square kilometre).’ (1)
The fact that people live and work in such conditions is not some form of cultural expression, as Prince Charles imagines, but the outcome of impoverishment and a lack of adequate infrastructure. There is nothing laudable about living in flimsy shacks handmade with ‘local’ materials, like asbestos sheets, cardboard, plastic sheets and pieces of cloth. And in the monsoon period, the ‘walkable neighbourhoods’ of Bombay that the prince imagines are so pleasant to stroll along become even more picturesque settings, as men and women have to wade through knee-high, sometimes even waist-high, water. Spilling over from the drains, the water carries a stinking blend of human and animal waste, bringing diseases such as dengue fever, leptospirosis and cholera which claim the lives of many inhabitants of those ‘walkable neighbourhoods’ every year.
For Prince Charles, these ‘traditional’ settings contain the ‘attributes for environmentally and socially sustainable settlements for the world’s increasingly urban population’. So instead of building a proposed 8,500-square feet, five-bathroom environmentally friendly house for his son William, perhaps Charles should send the young prince to Dharavi where he can experience the joys of sharing a queue every morning to use a toilet, or even better, squat on the roadside as many Bombayites still have to do. This would be a very spiritual experience for William, I’m sure, with invaluable lessons in green community living…
What is lauded by Prince Charles and other members of the Western elite as ‘environmentally sustainable living’ is just plain, stark poverty, and this is made to seem acceptable, even desirable, by the likes of the ranting prince. These people’s rejection of development means not only that people in the West are admonished for wanting more, but also that those in the developing world are encouraged to stay poor, to keep to their ‘traditional’ way of life. Trendy terms like ‘sustainable development’ and ‘organic farming’ are just new words for poverty, which dress up backbreaking work as something positive and rewarding.
Giving poverty a cultural hue makes it seem acceptable, and even suggests that people living in conditions that would be unbearable for Westerners have some sort of natural inclination to endure a poor standard of living. Indeed, Charles lauded the ‘built-in resilience’ of ‘such communities’. Poverty, then, is seen as a natural state for some rather than the product of social and political conditions. In this view, the poor can only adapt to, not overcome, their lot.
Dharavi has many rags-to-riches stories to tell, as do many of Bombay’s slums (2). The shanty town contains within its alleys thriving industries and some very busy people: tailors, leather manufacturers, potters, shopkeepers, carpenters, migrants in search of work and more. Ask anybody living there what they want their children to become, and the responses range from doctors and engineers to pilots and journalists.
Some slum dwellers have been moved, under the city’s rehousing programme, to sprawling flats in multi-storey buildings. Others have chosen to live in the slums to save for their children’s education or to send them abroad. Those Dharavi residents who oppose the redevelopment plans for the slum are not fighting for the right to retain their ‘lifestyles’; they are simply demanding a better deal than what’s on offer. They want more space and a safeguard for carrying on their occupations. Their concerns and apprehensions are very real — the ability to work, pay bills, afford maintenance and have a say in their own futures.
The ‘sense of community’ that Charles wants the West to take lessons from is not some curious quality of slum dwellers that holds some profound, spiritual meaning. It is a very real means of survival. There is no green sentimentality attached to the narrow lanes, dingy rooms, and open drains running outside their homes. Living in a slum is not a lifestyle choice, and nobody makes a song and dance about bonding in the toilet queues. People just get on with their lives, and what bonds them all is the aspiration for a better one. The shanty town sure has a lot of lessons for the West — that of ambition, enterprise and sky-high aspirations.

The Barack-o-mania

Barack Obama has become the first African-American president of the United States of America. He will go down in history as just that -- the first African American president of the United States of America. So yes, it was a historic win, and it is indeed inspiring. What was more inspiring was the massive voter turnout, an indication that the democratic process reigned over all cynicism. I would put a full stop right there.
The melodrama, however, in the Indian media, in the form of real over-the-top gushing over Obama’s victory has been quite extraordinary. Not to mention, the constant bemoaning of our own political leaders. Why can’t our politicians be more like theirs? What Obama’s rise to office shows us about our politics? Why can’t our politicians debate like American politicians? (Whinge whinge)
I woke up on Thursday morning and found the newspapers gripped by Barackomania. As I flipped page after page looking for calm nerves, every page seemed to get more and more hysterical. What Obama carries in his wallet, Will Obama grant Modi a visa? Obama’s new home, Obama’s new pet…
An NDTV online poll asks Why Indians love Obama. And the responses made me wonder what the adulation was based on. “because he is hot” (okay, I’ll let that one go), “he is a leader with selfless vision… he understands the needs of the common man”, “he is a person of great struggle…” more on his charisma, charm…
Barkha Dutt in her column in Hindustan Times said, confessing to being all teary eyes at Obama’s acceptance speech said: “The thing about Obama is that he makes you believe in that old cliché: be true to yourself. In a cynical, crumbling world, that alone is a miracle. That’s why Oprah cried. And so did the rest of us who were lucky enough to watch a night that will change America and the world.”
But will it? Obama has attained rock star-like status around the world, the new inspirational pin-up boy, an image certainly hard to carry off by our own parliamentary men in white. So the excitement around young B.O. is understandable. He is 47 years old, is suave, a great orator, very comfortable with the cameras, and ‘makes you believe in that old cliché: be true to oneself’. Not to mention that fantastic word that brings tears to everybody’s eyes – change!
But to imagine that politics has been revolutionised by his victory would be rather naïve. Especially because the one nagging question that still remains to be answered is: What does he stand for? And what’s beneath the rhetoric of change? And is politics merely about the administrative details of tax cuts and competing health policies, the if, when and how of withdrawal of troops from Iraq, of the justified political interventions as opposed to the unjustified? Or is it about ideologies that guide larger visions for society, about competing ideas that aim to transform the way society is organised?
It seems easy to make our own politicians the objects of derision. They are not sophisticated and well-spoken, they are mired in identity politics. But if we move beyond personality politics and all the gushing about Obama’s ‘struggle’, his diverse background, the honesty in his voice, his candour, and the fact that he is the first Black president of the United States, it is worth noting that none of it is actually a good substitute for real politics, and that we would have to wait and see. Does he retire into the mundane world of administration or does he really take stands that would alter society. Until then, get a grip!