India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (28 page)

“It’s so easy just to call crores of people middlemen and dump them into the sea,” he said. “But it’s very dangerous to effectively disenfranchise a large part of the population in the name of globalization or economic growth. What does it do to your society?”

He looked out toward the waterfront when he said that, to where men and women in colorful weekend clothes were milling along Bandra’s promenade. Some of them were holding hands. Others were flying kites. It was a cheerful, carefree scene.

“This society could do so much more for the poor,” Vinod said. “I mean, the poor have given the rich so much. For centuries, they bowed and tilled the land and built factories, and for hundreds of years they built wealth. No one is asking for that money to be returned. We’re not asking for accounts. We’re just asking them to
change things now, to change the way wealth is distributed in this country. But even that is being opposed.

“We’re not asking for accounts,” he repeated, and he trailed off, still looking at the waterfront, pensive in a way that made me wonder if he wasn’t, in fact, waiting for amends to be paid.

I spent some time with Vinod in the months after that first meeting
on Bandra’s waterfront. I got to know him a little. Once, voices like his—drawing attention to the poor, to the downtrodden and the forgotten—would have dominated public discourse. For all its self-righteousness and at times grating piety, the rhetoric, at least, of socialist India was deeply inclusive and egalitarian.

By the time I met Vinod, though, an era had passed, and the old discourse had been replaced by one that emphasized self-creation, self-sufficiency, and the fabulous riches that flowed from entrepreneurship. Voices like Vinod’s hadn’t exactly disappeared from the landscape of modern India, but they were being muffled—and often muzzled—by all the celebratory fervor, the din of a nation intent on enjoying its economic renaissance.

Some of Vinod’s views, it is true, struck me as a little anachronistic. But as I learned more about his work, I came to see that they were shaped by genuine, on-the-ground experience. His language might have seemed a holdover from a different moment, but it was in fact informed by a reality that was very current. In his work, Vinod came into daily contact with those being left behind by the nation’s economic growth; he was exposed to the seamier side of India’s development.

He was involved in an impressive range of projects. I met him, once, at his legal office, a small, cramped space on the second floor of a walk-up overlooking a noisy construction site. He’d been in court earlier that day. He was still dressed in his courtroom outfit: black pants, polished leather shoes, and a white shirt. He talked a little about the workers he represented. He said that, having advocated for globalization, Indian companies were now being forced to cut costs in order to survive. The easiest way to do that was to squeeze their employees.

One Sunday morning, I went with Vinod to Dadar, a congested neighborhood in the center of the city, where he walked me around a traditional market. The market was crowded with vegetable vendors, spice traders, and sugarcane juice stalls. Vinod said it had existed on the same spot for some seventy-five years. It was the type of place, he told me, that would be destroyed if India let in foreign retail firms.

In a cobwebbed warehouse at one end of the market, with the smell of spices strong in the air, rising in a tickle up my nose, he talked about the East India Company again. He said that economic liberalization didn’t just threaten the livelihoods of the types of traders we were seeing. It threatened, also, the social fabric of the city, and ultimately the country. Markets like these, Vinod said, held together different religions and castes in a tenuous web of commercial relationships. Destroy the market, and you destroy the web. That’s why capitalism was a form of cultural as well as commercial imperialism.

Vinod took me with him to Dharavi one afternoon. Dharavi was Mumbai’s largest slum. Vinod’s nonprofit organization ran a number of environmental programs there. It organized educational
events for children, and it defended the rights of Dharavi’s scavengers (or ragpickers, as they are known in India), who fanned out every day across the city and collected much of Mumbai’s waste. I wanted to see Vinod’s work in Dharavi; and I wanted, also, to see the slum through his eyes.

I had been to Dharavi before. I found it a profoundly depressing place. It was a nearly five-hundred-acre panorama of ramshackle huts, festering piles of garbage, and small workshops out of which toxic black fumes billowed into the sky. Around a million people were crammed into its narrow alleys. They lived amid pigs and rats and open sewers. The poverty, the filth, the environmental depredation were to me like giant blots on the sheen of India’s new economy.

Dharavi was the kind of place that made me question the system. It gave the lie to all the rhetoric about a new, shining India. In Dharavi, I found myself inching toward the kinds of views held by people like Naresh and Vinod.

Vinod and I went to Dharavi by autorickshaw. It was a wild ride. On a four-lane flyover, an elevated highway above the slum, the autorickshaw’s engine suddenly gave out. We were forced to scamper across the road, dodging cars and vans and motorcycles whose drivers seemed oblivious to our presence. I felt like a target.

We walked the rest of the way. When we got to Dharavi, I followed Vinod along a road lined with discarded refrigerators, washing machines, and piles of plastic and metal waste. Much of Dharavi’s informal economy revolved around the recycling of waste collected by the slum’s ragpickers. The waste was disassembled, segregated, repackaged, and recast and remade. The industriousness of
Dharavi’s population was legendary; for all its poverty, it had acquired a reputation as a dynamic and entrepreneurial place.

Vinod and I walked along a narrow lane bordered by recycling units and other commercial establishments. We passed a bakery, a snacks packaging unit, and a plastics recycling center. These places operated out of holes in the wall, many partially subterranean, their ceilings blackened by years of dirt and smoke. The ground was a confetti of plastic and paper and rubber waste. It was splotched with fetid pools of water that glistened with a chemical tint. Children, many shirtless, some without pants, all without footwear, played in the puddles.

Dickensian
was the thought that came to mind whenever I walked through Dharavi. Dickensian—and cruel, and gruesome, and ghastly, and no matter how many times I had previously been there, a profound sense of shock. Dharavi seemed like an act of betrayal to me, a treacherous stab at the heart of all the promises that had accompanied the nation’s reforms.

Up the road from Dharavi, to the east, was the massive Bandra Kurla Complex, a glass-fronted office building that housed India’s leading stock exchange and some of its biggest companies. To the west was the soaring Sealink, a nearly five-kilometer bridge that cut across the Arabian Sea, and that was upheld as a marvel of modern engineering. Standing in Dharavi, squeezed between these two paragons of the new nation, I found it hard not to believe that the economic course being followed by India was profoundly misguided.

I was horrified by Dharavi. But as Vinod and I walked around that afternoon, I came to see that he had a somewhat more nuanced take. He agreed that conditions in Dharavi were abysmal.
He agreed that the slum’s residents had been betrayed by the system; he said they had been “forgotten” by the nation. But in Dharavi’s workshops and factories, in its recycling units that processed an estimated 4,000 metric tons of waste a day, Vinod saw a triumph of the human spirit. He extolled the ingenuity of a people who had managed to build a life for themselves despite being left outside the formal economy. He celebrated the resilience of a population that refused to be crushed.

Dharavi’s existence, Vinod told me, could be seen as “a kind of success.” Standing outside a factory, talking above the whine of machinery, he said: “The question is whether you want to focus on the living conditions, which are terrible, or whether you want to focus on the dynamism and energy of this place. I see it as lakhs of people doing an honest day’s work. Yes, it’s unhygienic and it’s underpaid. But they’re doing it, and they’re contributing to the economy. The efforts of these people are subsidizing the economy.”

We made our way to the office of Vinod’s nonprofit organization. It was in a small wooden shack on a bridge overlooking Dharavi. It was piled with paper and plastic and electronic waste, and decorated with posters explaining how to recycle and fight climate change. Vinod sat with two artists visiting from New York. Dharavi had been featured in the Oscar-winning film
Slumdog Millionaire
, and it had given the slum a certain international cachet. People spoke (grotesquely, in my view) about a “Dharavi chic.” The artists were there to decorate the slum with murals and installation pieces.

I waited on the bridge outside Vinod’s office. I stood in a swarm of mosquitoes, overlooking a vista of corrugated iron roofs and plastic sheeting that barely held Dharavi’s factories and homes
together. The bridge shook every time a heavy vehicle passed over it. I imagined the bridge crumbling; I had visions of myself falling through the air, landing on the huge pile of garbage below me.

A group of children were playing on that pile. Rats ran around. Two goats tore at rotting fruit and bits of paper and plastic. The goats were stained a bright shade of indigo from pigment dumped by a nearby dye factory. The kids were playing in the same pigment.

In front of me, on the bridge, a father and son were sifting through a pile of glass and plastic cups. These would have been collected from tea shops across the city; many still had the grainy residues of tea or coffee. When they were done, the father and son cleaned up the sidewalk where they had been working, picking up bits of leftover plastic and a few shards of broken glass. They piled the cups into plastic bags, and then the father put his arm around the son, and they sat for a moment against a parapet on the bridge, catching a respite at the end of the day.

I thought of what Vinod had said to me earlier. Yes, I thought, these people have just finished an honest day’s work. In the way the father held his son, wrapped his arm around his shoulders, I caught a glimpse of the humanity—and human spirit—that Vinod told me about and seemed to celebrate. But still, I couldn’t get beyond the scene below me: the spectacle of those children playing in garbage, surrounded by rats and goats being poisoned by toxic dyes.

Vinod came out and I told him what I was thinking. I told him I had a hard time seeing Dharavi as a “success.” He took a deep breath. He seemed tired. He, too, was at the end of a day’s work. “Akash, no one is saying that the conditions here are ideal,” he
said. “To see Dharavi as a way of life is a misnomer. Dharavi is a way of survival, a way of sustenance and a way to earn a livelihood against all odds.

“Of course this isn’t a shining story, or a success story. The only success story here is the people—it’s their spirit, the fact that they work, the fact that they don’t get angry and try to burn everything down. It’s not a success story for the country as a whole or its society or its system. When I talk about India, I try to focus on the people. These people get up every day and work and survive. That’s a success story.”

As we made our way out of Dharavi, negotiating the end-of-day traffic, the Bandra Kurla Complex golden now under the evening sun, he went on: “The anger you feel is justified. I understand it. But if you want to make a change, you have to swallow anger. Feeling angry doesn’t help—it’s just a flame that could burn through these people. These people can’t afford that anger. It could drag down their lives and families. They can’t express anger, they can’t feel it, or it would burn out of control.”

Vinod, Naresh, and I went to a bar in Bandra. It was a modern
place, the kind of establishment that drew a trendy, upscale crowd. It was, as Naresh might have said, “a physical embodiment” of India’s economic transformation.

We sat in low, reclining chairs, and we watched as women in impossibly short skirts walked in, leading their boyfriends by the hand. We drank foreign beer. We ordered a serving of french fries with wasabi sauce.