The Poverty of Philosophy

Garbage and two-hour toilet lines are a way of life for many in Dharavi.
© Dante Montella

By Arjun Maniyar

People talk about the close-knit society in Dharavi but in reality, Dharavi represents this community out of necessity. This is to say that there may not actually be a desire for these residents of Dharavi to live in such a collectivist manner. People marvel at the “beauty” of the bonds that exist today amongst the residents in Dharavi. The trouble I see with this approach is that most of the Dharavi residents would give an arm and an ear for social independence. We declare that it is “wondrous” and “spectacular” that Dharavi functions as a collective, yet our own lives are beacons of a lifestyle centered around the person, not the family, and definitely not the community. It is unfair for us to pretend that residents of Dharavi are satisfied with “the scraps that are kicked them”. We have the ability to choose our lifestyle. The residents of Dharavi do not; this is the Poverty of Philosophy.
The term “poverty of philosophy” is a phrase I encountered in the lyrical verses of Felipe Andres Coronel, a Columbian who grew up in Harlem. He says that black and Latino people in American ghettos are exposed to forces in their environment which prevent them from being able to see how they are being used by the government. He decrees that if they are properly educated-both in and out of school, they would not allow themselves to be so grossly mishandled by the government. They lack the ability to be truly intellectual, and this is borne out of the environment in which they live. To elaborate, I cite Malcolm Gladwell’s new novel Outliers in which Gladwell writes about education and the relationship each social class has with it. He says, “These numbers come from research led by John Hopkins University sociologist Karl Alexander. Alexander tracked the progress of 650 first graders from the Baltimore Public School system, looking at how they scored on a widely used math-and reading-skills exam called the California Achievement Test.” Over 5 years, Alexander compiled data by retesting them each year. Gladwell continues, “The first graders from the wealthiest homes have a 32-point advantage over the first graders from the poorest homes…four years later, the initially modest gap between rich and poor has more than doubled.” Interestingly, this test was taken by the students at both the beginning and end of the year. Alexander noticed that the poor students were not learning anything over the summer whereas the wealthy students would come back scoring on average 52.49 points better than at the end of the previous year. The key is simple; alter the environment in which the poor children grow up, surround them with books, provide them with intellectually stimulating opportunities, and the student will have a much better chance of going to college and escaping the lower class. Although Dharavi is not plagued by the same dangerous environment that exists in Baltimore, they are surrounded by poverty so extreme that they cannot afford books to help them advance the way privileged kids advance. To advance in the same way a privileged student advances, the student in Dharavi would have to be a miraculously smart person, one who, given the opportunities which are provided to students with money, could have the capacity to potentially change the world. In essence, the rich only get richer, and the poor, poorer. My point is this: the government is holding the people of Dharavi back by providing them with substandard education; Dharavi and smaller slum communities like it are the only areas in all of Mumbai with students still attending municipal schools.

I was told by a community organizer named Bhau Korde that at these municipal schools, there are 12 year old children who cannot even spell their own name. And instead of being 100% critical of the system, we are declaring Dharavi to be “unique” and “special”, or the most grievous or which, the description, “beautiful”. We are copping out when we say that the community of Dharavi is vital because the truth is that I would rather see Dharavi riddled with broken relationships than infested with disease. People say that it would be fantastic if Dharavi could retain the community it has now, as it advances into the future, but I say no, what would be wonderful is if we allowed Dharavi to choose whether they want individuality or collectivity. Of course, now, they do not have a choice; they do not have the financial means to support an individualistic society. If we want to really liberate the people of Dharavi we must give them the same opportunity to move up in society as middle and upper class students. With that said, I doubt that those are the interests of the government, or anybody with a shred of power. This is what hinders the poor of both USA and India, and it is this poverty, the poverty of philosophy, of capital, of compassionate politicians, that we need to fix in order to prevent a revolution.

middle class for the rest of us

Levittown, Long Island, NY, circa 1950's

By Michael Montella
Mukesh Mehta has a dream. He wants all of planet earth’s denizens to join the middle class. He thinks he has found a method and is ready to test the plan.

Mr. Mehta is a figure at the center of a storm in India-- he is the master planner for the Dharavi Redevelopment Project. (DRP). The DRP is a plan to turn the squalor that is much of Dharavi into middle-class high-rise housing-- move the current million inhabitants from horizontal two and three story shanteys to modern flats on roughly half the land they currently occupy, and pay for this by allowing developers to exploit the other half for whatever the market will bear.

Mr. Mehta was a gracious host when we interviewed him at his Bandra-West offices. He gave us the latest version of his “slum-free India, slum-free world” power point presentation and allowed us to conduct a preliminary audio interview (our plan was to return several days later and videotape an interview at this apartment, but scheduling conflicts forced us to miss that opportunity).

Mehta made a bunch of money developing high-end properties on the exclusive north shore of Long Island, N.Y. before he returned to Mumbai twelve years ago, realizing Dharavi provided an opportunity to solve a problem the Maharashtra government and NGO’s could not solve (and make a fortune while he was at it.)

I won’t reproduce details of the plan here (see links to articles at bottom of this post). Instead, I’ll share my impressions of his presentation as best I can.

Two concepts seduced me then and stay with me now-- Mehta thinks he can make the world slum-free by 2020 (maybe just India by then) and with his plan, the slum-dwellers of Dharavi can be middle class, “just like him.” (and us).

His enthusiasm and the logic of his plan was infectious, I think all four of us agreed on that. “Wow! A slum-free India by 2020” Slums are everywhere in Mumbai, pockets of squatter-housing that seem to spring up overnight, like mushrooms in the forest after a rain. Metha said, “the aim is to turn today’s slum-dweller into tomorrow’s resident and citizen.” The logic of slum rehabilitation for Mehta is to “move people from bad housing and put them into good housing.” (For details of his plan see his website.)

Imagine a world with no poor people, no squalor, clean and tidy streets, no garbage, no sewerage!

With the right mix of free market and giving people the tools they need to succeed, these new citizens will most likely be introduced to the world a new stress-- wondering how to pay the rent and put food on the table as they are disconnected from the cottage industries they currently run out of their dwellings. Creating a condition the Austrian philosopher, social critic, and defrocked Roman Catholic priest, Ivan Illich called “The Modernization of Poverty.”

“Modernized poverty appears when the intensity of market dependence reaches a certain threshold. Subjectively, it is the experience of frustrating affluence which occurs in persons mutilated by their overwhelming reliance on the riches of industrial productivity. Simply, it deprives those affected by it of their freedom and power to act autonomously, to live creatively; it confines them to survival through being plugged into market relations.”
Toward a History of Needs, Ivan Illich, 1987. (see: http://www.primitivism.com/needs-illich.htm)

Loaded in the casual phrases we toss around all the time are many assumptions about various aspects of what I like to think about as “legitimacy.”

Success and “to succeed,” middle-class, poor and poverty, slums, “slum-dweller,” resident, citizen. homeless and most of all, “I” The ever-present western construction of the “individual.”

What would a middle-class world look like? Could it be sustained, would some have to give things up so others could have more? For Americans, the myth of “middleclassedness” transcends the traditional realities of “class.” It exists in a space somewhere between the American Dream, establishing identity through buying stuff and the next car or credit card payment. Is this what a planet of 6,773,181,852 billion “residents” will look like?

The United States houses 4.7 per cent of the world's population, but it uses 25 per cent of the world's resources. The billboards I saw in Mumbai were telling, “Infrastructure grows, India Grows!, and another, “India, from modernization to world power.”

How does all this resonate with claiming space and "legitimacy" in the context of the current western (American) reality. What are the similarities that the disempowered or marginally empowered in America share/have with those of highly organized slum communities in a place like Dharavi? Are the "stakes" higher for the urban poor in Mumbai or for those on the street or on the edge in the US?

Life in America is so intertwined with various measures of legitimacy; credit score, access to credit and loans, a drivers license, a lease, title, deed, mortgage, a job, “career” work history, all forms of validating the person. Resume, CV, portfolio, studio, portfolio. (financial portfolio). Is the fall from tenure in the aforementioned measures of legitimacy greater than the fall a slum-dweller faces? Does the slum-dweller have the means to recover more quickly than the disempowered westerner, absent of access to the validating and legitimating tools above?

Has the American way of life created a virtual slum, mentally, spiritually, psychically, just outside the realm of the validating mechanisms we are conditioned to embrace? A kind of “Modern Poverty” that Illich talks about?
I am not betting on the likelihood of the organic and thriving lifestyle that the people of Dharavi created through their own ingenuity surviving the DRP makeover. Much like the corporate and consumerist logic of conformity that the mythic, individualized western lifestyle demands, so to will the “master plan” for development and standardization of ways of life demand of the Dharavi residents.

I would like to see Mukesh Mehta’s plan succeed. I would like the people of Dharavi actually be participants in their future, I would like to see the wonderful nagas, of Dharavi, so full of energy, life and humanness survive.

Hey, while I am at it, I would like to see a world where we each use only what we need and redefine what those “needs” are. I would like to see a time where sharing is the norm, where the individual is just a bit less important that the we, where the commonweal comes to mind first. I would like to see a world where the incessant need to consume and make more stuff and more garbage and more human exploitation and more greenhouse gasses is not necessary.

The real “inconvenient truth” I fear, is that all this is not possible in a middle-class needs driven world.

Links about the DRP:

• www.financialexpress.com/news/Blueprint-for-a-new-Dharavi/140257/0#
• www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jun2009/mumb-j13.shtml
• www.livemint.com/Articles/PrintArticle.aspx?artid=CF7BDCB4-20C0-11DC-9715-000B5DABF613
• www.dharavi.org/
• http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/india/article.cfm?articleid=4223

primary care

Street outside Dr. Kembhavi's clinic.

Photos by Michael Montella

Dr. Ashok Kembhavi, who grew up in the slums of Dharavi, has been practicing medicine there for over thirty years. In this clip, he talks about typical conditions seen in his practice, and the overall mental state of most slum-dwellers. He is interviewed, in between patients, Tuesday, 23 June, by Arjun, Manisha, Dante and myself.

small thoughts on sustainability

Dharavi street- afternoon. © Dante Montella

by Michael Montella

How is it that a city of 13 million or a neighborhood in Dharavi can at times seem quieter than my neighborhood, located in a rural town of 6000 people?

I live is a small miid-hudson valley town of approximately 6000 residents. With a population density of 318.5/sq mi (123.0/km2). Mumbai city proper has a population of 13,922,125 with a density of 21,880 /km2 (56,669 /sq mi).

Dharavi, spanning an area of about 223 hectares (550 acres), is home to between half a million and one million people (no recent and reliable population statistics are available). A 1986 survey by the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF) counted 530,225 people (106,045 households) living in 80,518 structures; the numbers have surely grown since then.

A recent survey established that a central area of Dharavi (Chamra Bazaar) contained densities of up to 336,643 people per square kilometer! Assuming a population of 700,000, the population density in Dharavi would be around 314,887 per square kilometer. 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 kilometer) and more than 6 times as dense as daytime Manhattan (about 50,000 people per square kilometer).

While there was a constant hum and chatter on the streets of Dharavi, I rarely experienced a decibel noise level that I regularly hear in my town-- or anywhere in the U.S. where houses are close together. It wasn’t until I was back at home that I heard the roar of motorcycles at full throttle going up the hill past my house. Or the rumble and squeal of eighteen-wheelers as they try to slow down, having been going too fast already, negotiate the downhill curve just beyond my house.

In the bustling metropolis that is Mumbai, in ten days, i’d be hard-pressed to say I heard more that one siren from an emergency vehicle. Surely, I saw ambulances and police a-plenty. But there was something about the overall footprint that didn’t call attention to itself.

Americans love to step on the gas, zoom past the scenery at the fastest possible rate of acceleration-- and when the empty light comes on pull in to fill up on our subsidized gasoline (still some of the cheapest in the world). Lawnmowers, high-speed, cup-holder equipped grass chewers, weed-wakers, leaf blowers and leaf suckers. Power tools of every kind, to do the simplest job. Maybe even for one-time use-- then destine to sit on the self and collect dust. Think about the amount of energy it takes to produce, ship, distribute, drive around and operate all this stuff! The amount of energy it takes to cart the unwanted of it away. The landfill, the toxic byproducts. I know, we all heard it before.

I wonder what the median number of gas powered and electric motor driven machines Americans have per person?

It isn’t my intention to throw the preverbal “baby out with the bath-water” There are plenty of things I appreciate about my native country and my Hudson Valley home.

Seeing stark differences can help us take stock of and perhaps reassess and make adjustments of our own ways.

Dharavi in reference to the government

Shirish Patel ©Dante Montella

By Arjun Maniyar

With absolute clarity, I see truth in the words of J.R.R. Tolkien when he said, "not all who wander are lost". Dharavi is a community of wanderers; a group of people who journeyed from wherever to get to Mumbai and make a new and improved life for themselves and their family. 100 years ago, Dharavi had virtually zero residents. Today though, this area acts as a home to at least 600,000 people. I bring this up because the fore-mentioned journeyers, who would later become "squatters", came to Mumbai with nearly nothing but a desire to put food on the table for their family. Consequently, these men were by no means lost. Yes, they were wanderers, but wanderers with a purpose and sense of direction. So I will say it again, these people are not lost. In fact, it is the government that is lost; the Indian government has been lost in discriminatory customs against Dharavi since people first began to trickle to the land. These customs date back to the caste system in which members of lower castes were not even allowed to look at people of a higher caste. The government, in essence, endeared the caste system because it was financially and socially viable for them to turn their backs on the residents of Dharavi. Financially, quite simply, the government felt that it was unnecessary to spend money on those they viewed as "second-class citizens". Instead, they wanted to improve and clean up the already nice areas of Mumbai for the affluent people living there. Socially, the government met no protest from lawmakers or non-Dharavi residents. Amazingly, in spite of governmental negligence and complete lack of support in basic municipal services, Dharavi has blossomed by creating business through offering unbeatable prices and taking care of the work nobody else in the city wants to handle (recylcing, textiles, garbage).

When the Dharavi residents realized that it was socially acceptable by the rest of Mumbai for the government to allow them to squander, they simply built industries in Dharavi from within. In other words, residents control industries in Dharavi without ever having to set foot in the "financial" areas of Mumbai. For many decades, residents of Dharavi took care of themselves, relying only upon themselves and the community which they had helped build. In the truest sense of the phrase, the residents of Dharavi are "self-made men". So now that the government has a vested interest in Dharavi (according to Mukesh Mehta, they stand to make $2-3 Billion) and the media is taking a larger interest in the slums, they are pushing their plan forward in typical fashion- with little regard to the wants or needs of the residents. It is now about developing this highly desirable piece of land and not about developing the people. Retired architect Shirish Patel described the plan, telling us that the government is taking the people and putting them on half the land they were on. They are taking the other half of the land and making it commercial, which will pay for the "free" housing to be provided to the original residents of Dharavi. Mr. Patel says that this kind of plan works in cases in which there are not astronomical densities. In this case, Dharavi is the densest community in the world, and thus, this redevelopment project has a serious and realistic chance of failing.

Personally, I think the government should open its eyes a little wider and try to address the needs of the people. But of course, that will not happen, it is not the government's job to care about the needs of the people...not in Mumbai at least.

Contrary to Assumptions

Horizontal vs. Vertical slums. © Dante Montella

by Michael Montella

In Mumbai for ten days our best intentions were to blog and upload photos and video several times as the trip unfolded. We kept a non-stop schedule with little time for sleep. Getting around Mumbai is a task in itself, traveling two or three miles by car can easily take an hour. Horns honking, auto-rickshaws, motorcycles and scooters weaving in and out of traffic, human and vehicular. The traffic is staggering, yet the drivers are not aggressive, it all seems to flow-- an internal combustion powered river of machine and humans. A honk is intended to say “hey, I am here” and not “fuck you jack!” The trip is part of the journey and the destination just a stop along the way. As an American, I am so focused on the result-- “are we there yet?-- do the ends justify the means?”

The lesson I learned about Mumbai traffic seems to carry over to life in the slums. But I have to digress, as I experience the slums in Mumbai, I ask, “just what is a “slum?” I think of the shanty-towns in South Africa or Mexico City. The south Bronx of the 1970’s, inner-city Washington DC, Detroit, Newark. drugs, crime, violence, all conditioned by the media-- even the American slum is a more complex place than the widely accepted, middle-class narrative. Dharavi is few, if any of the above class-conditioned givens.

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slum
A slum, as defined by the United Nations agency UN-HABITAT, is a run-down area of a city characterized by substandard housing and squalor and lacking in tenure security.
The characteristics associated with slums vary from place to place. Slums are usually characterized by urban decay, high rates of poverty, and unemployment. They are commonly seen as "breeding grounds" for social problems such as crime, drug addiction, alcoholism, high rates of mental illness, and suicide. In many poor countries they exhibit high rates of disease due to unsanitary conditions, malnutrition, and lack of basic health care.

Dharavi has a good deal of substandard housing and infrastructure (whatever that really means) I experienced the “squalor” (again, what does that mean?) and there are issues of so-called tenure security (a fancy name for renters rights and land title). The aforementioned items are where the above definition ends in my experience of Dharavi.

The kindness, generosity and relaxed, peaceful nature of people living packed together-- Hindu, Muslim, Catholic, Goan, Gujarat, Tamil-- people from all over India, distinct cultural and religious groups have no precedent in any of my other experiences.
Several doctors we interviewed confirmed that they see little serious illness and access to basic medical care is affordable and available. Medicines are a fraction of what they cost in the US. In contrast to the conditions on the street, the homes we were invited inside were neat and clean. The ‘squalor” outside can be attributed to an utter absence of municipal services, lack of responsibility by the government and the sheer numbers of people living in close proximity. The nagas of Dharavi thrive in spite of the government.

Contrary to assumptions and the picture painted by Slumdog Millionare, residents of Dharavi are mostly not poor and very few are destitute. Most work or have small businesses. We are told that if you have no food or place to sleep you are cared for by the community. No one goes hungry.

As Dante and I sat laughing and joking with some people on the sidewalk in the Muslim naga-- who offered us, guests in their neighboorhood, their chairs, I felt so at ease in the heat, humidity, sounds and life on the street.

The trip exceeded my wildest expectations, and while I feel the “story” we will tell has not formed we have amazing individual and collective stories. Where to start, nothing that I read or experienced prepared me for Dharavi, the most densely populated place on earth.

Impressions of India. (or just Mumbai)

Imran, (left, with a friend, right) A seventeen-year old
Muslim man who guided us through Dharavi on
Tuesday, 23 June. Photo by Michael Montella

By Michael Montella

Sensory overload with the strongest being smell. Smells, unfamiliar smells, some good many bad. I notice the absence of manufactured fragrances that are ubiquitous back home. Americans are addicted to smells from a bottle or a can.
Arrived Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport. One of the busiest in south Asia, Sunday around 10:45 PM. As we walked off the jet, the humidity became apparent and the air conditioning was provisional. The smell was musty and mildewy. I guess I expected an up-to-date, gleaming terminal. It appeared to be last renovated sometime in the 1970’s.
On the drive from the airport to the hotel it becomes clear that slums are widespread in this city that holds the second largest urban population and fourth largest urban agglomeration after Tokyo, New York and Mexico City. The generously donated hotel rooms are as fine as anywhere, but again my thoughts return to smell. In the case of the hotel, a neutrality of fragrance. I realize how accustomed I am to certain fragrances with my american cultural conditioning. The average, everyday Indians I have encountered are not big on prefabricated fragrance and when I do encounter it, as in the still under construction shopping mall we visit, it is unmistakably Indian, as in the ayurvedic soap our family occasionally uses in our bathroom.
Monday morning, Mumbai, (which many locals still call Bombay). Sunny and hot. No worse that south Florida in the summer-- I can take this, no problem. Dante and I meet Manisha and her son Arjun for breakfast and we decide our first day we will visit Dharavi unescorted. Our driver picks us up at the hotel and we head to Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, with a population of between 600 thousand and 1 million packed in an area of 0.67 square miles.
As we enter along one of the border roads, all four of us, western, two caucasian and two Indian, stick out as if we have a follow-spot trained on us. Visual overload, horns honking constantly and the dominant sense for me is smell. This time, the smell of rotting garbage, urine, animals, perspiration, sewerage. The smell combined with the heat is oppressive. I think, I am not intimidated, I am a New Yorker, used to crowds of people, have been to “slums” before in New York.

We get caught in the flow of people in the narrow streets, school is just getting out and the children are all over us, “hi, hi” “slumdog” “hi” -- my concept of social space disintegrates. I think my pocket will be picked in a heartbeat. The adults just glare, “why are YOU here in our neighborhood, clearly you are not visiting a friend.” We persist and walk past a school, “The English School” and go in. Manisha, who speaks Hindi, asks if we can have a look. The headmistress invites us in and we are allowed to photograph and video the classes. The children are enthusiastic to learn and the teachers demand their student’s attention. We are invited back to interview some of the administrators and teachers on another day.
Again, oppressive heat and smell. We take a turn down a narrow alley. Now the smells are overwhelming, Rotting garbage, I begin to wretch, we are besieged with suspicious and uneasy glances. Doorways to cramped workspaces where hazardous work is taking place with no safety protection. I smell burning plastic, metal being shaved, oil, urine. I really feel out of my element-- all of us do. Dante is snapping pictures. The driver picks us up and we enter the flow of Mumbai traffic. It again becomes clear that slums and substandard housing are everywhere in this section of the city-- far from the gleaming downtown we will get to tour on Sunday.
Back at the hotel, I shower for a long time. My intellectual assumptions and attitudes are being challenged by my subliminal cultural conditioning.

Day Two.
We visit the Dharavi clinic of Dr. Ashok Kembhavi. Essentially an open-air stall on the street with a waiting area and behind a door, two exam tables in a space no more than 10x10. He lets us interview him and video him examining a women patient. The most striking thing he shares is that he sees almost no stress related conditions or conditions related to poor diet. Heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, cancer.
We are given a guided tour of some neighborhoods or nagas by a seventeen year old man. This time my impressions are easy, our experience with residents is mediated by our escort. The smell is down because the monsoon rains have started. Most of the people seem happy and busy. Fruit-sellers, merchants, people everywhere. Dante has a good rapport with the camera and his subjects. People talk to us freely, the kids, mostly the boys are really curious and want to shake our hands and have their pictures taken.

The people of Dharavi seem very well adjusted to their lives, good and bad.

Your Huddled Masses

Kids on Dharavi street © Dante Montella


John Bhai. Video still, Michael Montella

by Arjun Manyiar

As I meandered along the dirty and narrow streets of Dharavi, I was reminded of the old American adage; “Send me your tired, your weak, your poor, your huddled masses”. While immersing myself into the world that is Dharavi, I have been overwhelmed by both the stark differences and also the subtle similarities between the dense, vibrant slums, and my relatively calm and peaceful city of Washington D.C. With that said, I would like to systematically share my observations with you, particularly as I spend time in learning about the slums during my visit to Mumbai.

I wanted to open with the fore-mentioned quote because I believe that it applies just as equally to the city of Mumbai as it did in the 1850’s on the ports of Boston and New York, albeit people are all of the same color in Mumbai, but they stem from every corner of India, are involved in numerous different religious affiliations, and are from every walk of life. Take for example, Imran, a young Muslim boy who directed us through Dharavi. His family comes from Banares, Utter Pradesh, which is a poor city in one of the poorest states in the country. He and his father have moved from slum area to slum area in Mumbai for almost the entirety of his life. He exemplifies the Mumbai immigrant, someone who decided to leave the direly poor area of Utter Pradesh and try and make a life for himself in the city of dreams, Mumbai. He is accompanied by thousands of other Indians, coming from every state of the country to provide for themselves and their family.

They see people go to Mumbai, which is often called “the New York” of India, and create wealth for themselves and consequently, they make the same trip hoping for an opportunity. These people are typically poor and malnourished, ones who need to come to a big city because their local economic endeavors are fruitless. This bears striking resemblance to the Europeans emigrating to Boston and New York in the 1850’s. Just as impoverished Indians risk everything and move to Mumbai, Europeans left, sometimes even as whole towns, and attempted to make a new life in the United States. Similar to what Mumbai has been doing, the United States accepted Europe’s tired, weak, and poor.

These immigrants to America tended to live in small apartment complexes and “shack-type” structures. An Indian-Catholic man in Mumbai, John, shares a similar immigrant story; he moved from Goa in the 1930’s and lived with his family in a shack. Eventually, through perseverance, he created his own construction company, and now controls 15 different brick and tin houses. This sounds like “the American dream” to me. A true rags to riches story. The only difference is that John, unlike immigrants who found wealth in America, decided to stay with his community in Dharavi to help his people. This is because Dharavi has one feature that is unique to any big city in the world: a community. The community in Dharavi is strong, so strong that it allows women to walk around alone at night without any fear, keep crime at a minimum, and retain a sense of family in an increasingly individualized world. And people like John are the ones who maintain the integrity of the community. The truth is that forget about slums, most cities do not have equivalently low crime rates. So this is where I see real differences in Dharavi; I see a proud people, people who are not ashamed of where they live, people who will not move out of Dharavi even if they could. John put it perfectly when he said, “I feel that I must go with the people.” And then I was really surprised.