the commercialization/consumption of poverty

Amardeep
has an interesting post on slum tourism in India. A Korean doctor came to visit India about five years ago, and was keen to see two things, the poor at New Delhi Railway Station and the Taj Mahal. I do not understand the obsession at looking at poverty, but if it benefits both the viewer and the viewed, let it continue. Growing up in India, and seeing the poor in your face, one tends to try and block them out. Even when there is a mother and a starving child on her breast, or a disabled man slumping towards your car, or a five year old selling magazines, with golden malnourished hair.

Dharavi stretched before us like a vast junkyard, a hodgepodge of brick and concrete tenements roofed with corrugated metal sheets that gleamed dully in the sunshine. Poojari gave us a moment to take it all in. “We’ll show you the positive side of a slum,” he declared.

In the face of such squalor, his words seemed jarring. But Dharavi’s industriousness is well documented. Its businesses manufacture a variety of products—plastics, pottery, bluejeans, leather goods—and generate an estimated $665 million in annual revenue. In other words, Dharavi is not just a slum, it is also a node on the global economy.

Dharavi’s industries are arranged geographically, like medieval guilds, and the first alley we visited belonged to recyclers. In one small “godown” (as warehouses are known on the subcontinent), men were disassembling old computer keyboards. In another, men smeared from head to toe in blue ink stripped the casings from used ballpoint pens so they could be melted down and recycled. A few doors down, workers used heavy chains to knock the residue from steel drums that had once contained polyester resin. Poojari told us that some of Dharavi’s empty plastic bottles come from as far away as the United Kingdom. “People from a rich family, when they drink from a plastic bottle, they don’t know what happens to it afterwards,” he said. “Here, you see.”