Mumbai

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Mumbai was our last stop for our trip in India and in true Indian style the flight was late to land and all the ‘carparks’ were full so we had to park the aircraft on the wrong side of the airport and take a bus on the scenic tour of the airfield. By around midnight we had reached our hotel and settled into our room for a nice sleep…until sometime in the middle of the night when I woke up just in time to see Bianca vomit…greaaaaat!

For the second time this trip it seemed like Bianca had eaten, drank or breathed something nasty (there are so many possibilities in India!) and it was pretty obvious that she wasn’t going to be going anywhere that day, so we settled in and got acquainted with our TV and the view from our window (which by the way was pretty good as we could see the cathedral like architecture of Victoria Terminus). By the afternoon I was feeling pretty peckish and bored so I headed out for a walk. Just outside our hotel was a swarm of humanity all walking towards the train station. When you think swarm of humanity that brings to mind a lot of people, but the Australian version of a swarm is a miniature version of Indian peak hour. Victoria Terminus is a massive train station built by the British and about 2.5 million people pass through it each DAY! I decided to just follow the crowds of people around the corner and into the station where the terminal was simply a crush of people all waiting to get out of the city. Trains ran frequently and were standing room only, and it was interesting to see the ‘women only’ carriages with the wire ‘poking finger proof’ mesh over the windows. Despite the number of people using the train network it seemed to function quite well, as long as you were prepared to yell, scratch and fight your way onto the train to seize the holiest of holy’s - a seat!

By the next morning Bianca’s unknown sickness seemed to have passed but she didn’t think she was feeling up to the sights (and smells) of the Dhairavi slums, aka the Slumdog Millionaire slums, so I went alone. A local NGO run by people from the slums runs a tour with the aim of dispelling the negative perceptions of the slums as a place where people live in squalor and essentially do nothing productive. To join the tour everybody met at Churchgate station and then caught a train out to a suburban station within walking distance of the slums. There were about 5 people in the group and our guide was a young university student who had grown up and still lived inside the slums.

From the height of a footbridge that crosses the railway tracks you are greeted with your first sight of the slums - a very dense area of two storey buildings where 1 million people live in a 0.75 square mile area of land. As the aim of the tour was to show the productiveness of the slums, much of the first part of the tour was through small factories that make up a large percentage of the slum land area. Apparently the slums produce about US$700 million per year from things such as recycled materials, clothing and textiles, pottery, leather, food etc.

The first stops we made were in a group of factories that processed scrap plastics into small coloured plastic beads which were bought by other companies to melt down into new plastic objects. No single factory completed the process from start to finish and each would specialise in one small part e.g. chopping up recycled computers, bottles etc into small pieces, cleaning and drying, melting, dying etc.

In the next area that we came too, men recycled metal products such as aluminium which was melted down into solid bricks, industrial oil tins (of course any leftover remnants of oil was scraped out and recycled first) and interestingly the tins from cooking oil. I had presumed cooking oil tins, particularly damaged ones, would be simply turned into scrap metal but they are actually reused by the cooking oil companies. Men clean the cans and remove the labelling and any that are damaged are either bent back into shape or holes patched up over a fire. One of the most striking things throughout all these factories was a lack of safety and heavy pollution. Men would be working over hot fires or machinery in only shorts, singlets and thongs and the air was often thick with smoke and fumes. I assume that there are lot of people in the slums suffering from respiratory problems and even poor eyesight after a few years.

From the factory area we moved into a more residential area. One of the first things that becomes evident is that the whole area is kept relatively clean and the houses that you can see into are very neat and tidy and seeing a satellite dish hanging out a window isn’t all that uncommon. Our guide took us past his house which was two stories, but only comprised one room on each level, each probably smaller than an average bedroom but shared by about 6 or 7 people. As Dhairavi is a ‘legal’ slum the buildings are built from more permanent materials but are still often constructed with a bizarre assortment of materials. Within the residential area of the slums there are several apartment buildings that have been constructed by the government as an alternative to slum living, however many people have been reluctant to move into them because they would have to start paying maintenance fees (not rent) which they are unable to afford.

One of the major problems that the slums have is lack of sanitation, sewerage and fresh water. Water flows for about 2 hours each morning and people are forced to fill containers and buckets with all the water that they think they will need for the next 24 hours. Public toilets are a bit of an urban legend and the ones that do exist are terrible. Instead privately run toilets have been built and residents pay a nominal fee to use them, but long lines of people there in the morning mean that many people go out in public. Garbage is not collected from within the slums either as government garbage men will not venture inside so there were some areas of land that had mountains of waste collecting with children and dogs playing on top.

One of the final stops we made was at a private kindergarten. Our guide said that many residents were unimpressed with the standards of government education and the crowding of students (50+ students per teacher) and if they could afford it would pay for their children to receive private education. That said, this particular school seemed pretty overcrowded as well and my quick headcount of the classroom came to about 50 children.

After I got back from the tour, I picked up the sicky who by this stage was feeling pretty good again, and we caught a cab down to the Gateway of India which essentially just a big arch down by the edge of the water where boats would stop in Bombay back in Colonial days. Next door to the gateway is the Taj Hotel, one of the landmark hotels of the world and also the location of some of the Mumbai attacks in 2008. We went in to have a look which was an ordeal in itself - you place your bags through an airport style x-ray machine and are metal detecter-ised and patted down yourself before you can enter the lobby. The hotel itself was decadent as you would expect and the lobby was a mix of polished stone, woods and fancy gardens. We tried to get in to one of the various restaurants inside but ended up leaving because we didn’t fancy the 2+ hour wait for a table (pfft as if we are not VIP’s, we even wore our formal cargo pants and slightly less wrinkled tshirts!). Instead we opted for a Chinese restaurant for commoners outside and had a good (and massive) final meal for India before our morning flight to Sri Lanka the next day.

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Photos

Massive crowds
On their way to Victoria Terminus

Victoria Terminus
Side entrance

Victoria Terminus
This is a train station

the Taj Hotel
An oppulent hotel where much of the Mumbai attacks took place