Reposting from UPOU Community Site blog dated March 6, 2011
I was in Mumbai for a few days, before and after my paper presentation over at Pune, Maharashtra. A good friend of mine booked me a walking trip to Dharavi, Asia's largest slum where a population of Tamils, Muslims, and Hindus reside while conveniently making a living out of all sorts of garbage. Since my olfactory sense is quite keen, I prepared my nose of course for all kinds of scents. I prepared my heart as well as I would not know how to react upon seeing the poor having been merely exposed to the usual sight of poverty in the Philippines.
To my surprise, I ended up breathing in the people and their ways....the sight of ingenuity and spirit of survival against all odds and accepting this as part of life is what overwhelmed me the most.
I tried to imagine what it was like living here at Dharavi. Since rent is cheap and close to other forms of jobs in the city, perhaps I shall give it a try if that's the only option for the moment. Then the moments would grow into days, weeks, months and years of doing the same work, earning a little, enough to spend for clothes or a good phone or to offer my loved ones someplace else. Then living in a square space should do. With all the routine and humdrum of city life, would I even care to dream new dreams, or travel back to where I once belonged? No way. I simply have to tell myself to keep on with whatever comes as I'm here anyway. This place then becomes my home and a choice I shall live with. If this is what poor means to the rest of the world, then let poverty be my lifestyle.
From the highways/bridgeways, the shantis seem to me like an image of block houses of mud or clay in towns or villages right outside some royalty's abode of long ago—where the merchants and markets are, where real people are....only the time and settings have changed. Yet howcome a Filipino such as I and even today never felt unsafe as I took all forms of travel within Mumbai-Pune. Moving through the crowd and with the people was like second skin to me and I took in as much as I could in the same way I do whenever I take the public transport in Manila.
And so I do not leave Dharavi with pity nor carry with me any stench. Instead I carry memories of people living the way they do. I am in no position to judge parents and worry about their children's health and education. But I worry more about this rich man I saw who easily parked his BMW amidst his people to maybe arrange for delivery of goods/payments as he'd rather spend his money on his everything else than invest on safer working conditions for his fellowmen and their children...how rich can the rich get then? I'd rather not know.
What I have now with me is the India I choose to embrace and still dream of coming back to -- an old friend and a new one, a bigger territory I know I can navigate myself in, with people who have accepted this country as their home and will manage to get somewhere, not on any other nation's terms but theirs.
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