“Bombay is a crowd. But I began to feel, when I was some way into the city from the airport that morning, that the crowd on the pavement and the road was very great, and that something unusual might be happening.”

Every new visitor to Bombay, has had a similar observation to that of V. S. Naipaul, as he arrived in the city to write his dark, vibrant, and exciting travelogue, India: A Million Mutinies Now. He was introduced to a city of much warmth; a city of much chaos; a city of many people.

Ever since Naipaul’s experiences were documented between 1988 and 1990, an incredible process of transformation has continued to change the face of Bombay; now Mumbai. Many of the neighbourhoods of 1988 have grown into sky-scraping districts, embracing global connections and international faces. The faces of Naipaul’s “crowds” themselves have changed in so many ways, experiencing warm embrace, violent clash, and boisterous development. Some have become wealthy, while others have remained poor.

As urbanists continue to stretch and scrunch the literary fabric of today’s Mumbai, it is important to make reference to these wonderful works of the past. They remind us that documentations must be made of the city’s most cherished and personal vessels; its people.

Mumbai, “is a crowd”. But what do we see in the crowds of today?

On the 6^th and 7^th of this month we organised a 48 hour workshop with and for the residents of New Transit Camp in Dharavi. We have spent now nearly 3 months working with the children at the Dharavi Shelter, creating a new platform for art and expression, learning about the residents’ lives and thoughts and sharing this space for learning and growing.

We have been engaged in activities ranging from drawing and painting, animation screening, dance, visits to the city, as well as improving the current space we inhabit. What has been very special from the start of this small initiative, is that we have closely worked with the residents of the community, always seeking elders advice and understanding the communities´ aspirations and hopes for the shelter, and we have been working hard to try and achieve them.

The 48 hour event we organised in Dharavi had two main aims, one was to gain some more funds for our dreams for the site to include a space for a library and a computer room, as well funds for more activities, and the other was to raise more awareness and get more people involved in the shelter and its activities.

The event was incredible, not because we raised a lot of money (because we honestly didn’t!) but because together with the effort of so many volunteers and the community we engaged in two days of sharing, learning and lots of fun with so many new creative activities with the children.

The first 24 hours

So the first day, after setting up the artwork for sale and organising the hall, we began our daytime activities. The children engaged in a drawing competition facilitated by Common Room artists Khushnam and Anitra. This was followed by a clay workshop by a group of youth from neighbouring ‘Khumbarwada’ (a part of Dharavi where Gujarati potters live and work) who made little toys and objects out of clay. In the afternoon, a painting workshop was conducted by American artist Alison Reeves and in addition to this, Sejal and Snowy, also conducted a mural painting workshop with a group of children inside the Shelter. They painted the walls with blackboard paint to enable the space to be used for learning in the future.

In addition to all the art activities, Sudharak Olwe, from the Times of India Group, and his team of photographers also exhibited the photographic work they have been doing in Dharavi and made a presentation about their future work. Now their team is interested in commencing a photography workshop with the children so that the children document their environment and neighbourhood streets.

In this space, we also displayed an Austrian exhibition which documented ´cultures of living´ through images of homes and people which were photographed and then exchanged to later emerge as a book.

At the event, Italian and German and students from Liebniz University that had been working in Dharavi for a week learning about the history of the houses, presented back to the community what they had learnt and what they wished to work on in the future. The work was exhibited in the main hall enabling community residents to discuss and critique what they saw. It was an extremely valuable opportunity for sharing and learning as well as generating discussions about people’s stories, their creative efforts and their aspirations.

Lastly, the evening ended with a beautiful musical performance by sitar player Madhusudhan Kumar who was accompanied by his tabla player. The musicians called on the participation of the children and beckoned them onto stage to give them an introduction to classical Indian rhythms. The children sang and screamed to their hearts content!

The last 24 hours

The second day began with new energy and new volunteers. Roy, Avani, Parul and Steve, brought with themselves lots of paper plates, feathers, glitter and paints and conducted an extremely enjoyable mask making activity with the children. In addition to this an Italian photographer, that has travelled around India for quite many months, dropped by to show his work to the children and learn about their opinions and thoughts about what they saw. The Khumbars, dropped by again as well, this time to demonstrate to the audience, their pot making skills on the spinning wheel. In addition Yashmi and Namta did an incredible mural painting workshop with the children in the entrance wall of the shelter, where they joined in a collaborative effort to paint a tree with many branches and gathered the children to write their names all around it.

In the early evening, we were joined by the Capoeria group in Mumbai, who came to conduct a small class and perform their beautiful art at the event. Rezah Massah, the professor of the team, imbibed the audience with uplifting energy and gathered the children to do some capoeira exercises. This was then followed by a brilliant performance from the team.

Koli (the fishermen folk and original residents of Dharavi and the city) set up a stall and sold delicious fish treats for the hungry bellies throughout the evening. People mingled, gathered, shared, learnt, danced, smiled, participated and most importantly enjoyed themselves!

The final activity for the event was the much waited dance competition the children had been practicing for weeks. Paul’s wife (who owns the shelter and has encouraged us to work there) took over the stage and presented the dancers show. This was followed by a prize distribution and lots of music, dancing and fun!

The event was a great opportunity for us to reach out to more people that came to learn about the Shelter, but most importantly for the children and  residents to engage in a 2 day art event that brought people from outside to step into Dharavi for the first time and learn what this place is really about; a place where ambitions are strong, and aspirations are high, where children have an incredible energy and a capacity to learn and swallow the world if given the opportunity, where the worlds future artists and creative minds exist, where people have the will, the strength and heart to make things change for the better by themselves. A place that needs to be legitimized so that people can synergize all their positive energy into working towards their future rather than battling against a system by which they are deemed illegal, by a system that doesn’t collaborate with the residents to understand who they really are, by a system that wants to use a ‘tabula rasa’ approach and force them all to start from zero all over again.

A few weeks ago, our Sunday was spent painting clay pots that we purchased from the nearby Dharavi neighbourhood of Khumbarwada, which is only a five minute walk from the Dharavi Shelter and the Transit Camp.

From some of our small donations that we have received up to this date, we managed to buy some pots, paints, brushes and wire. The children from the Shelter organised themselves into groups and painted the clay pots producing some incredible patterns and designs. A local resident then came in to help us hang the pots in the entrance patio of our Shelter and at the same time we began painting the bricks on the entrance wall in the patio.

This activity was one of a series of activities we are want to carry out to transform the Shelter and develop it into an incredible and beautiful space for art, creativity, exchange and learning.

The following images have some more of our plans to convert the remaining space we have surrounding the existing structure. We have included approximate costs for each of these activities.

Your contributions are most welcome!

A picnic had been a strong request for weeks now and so Himanshu and I thought that taking them to the Kala Ghoda Arts festival in Mumbai would be an extremely enjoyable experience for learning, sharing and engaging in other creative activities that are experienced by other people in this city.

Our Sunday began with a slow start. Organising 22 children and getting them on a public bus into town was a hard task! However on arrival, we realised that things were actually no going to get easier as we had initially thought! At the entrance of the children’s activity area of the festival we met a little resistance. We had asked for prior permission to bring approximately 20 children to the activity area and had received an ok, but when we arrived on Sunday, with our 22 children, 6 volunteers and all our bundles of excitement, we were told at first – ‘’sorry these children cant come in… you cant do this….and we will not get them a t-shirt….these children will come tomorrow again asking for t-shirts!”

Why does our class-based society promote so much social exclusion? These sweeping judgements were unnecessary and uncalled for. Just because our children don’t speak english and wear expensive clothes, they need not be excluded in actively participating in a festival that promotes arts and culture in the city. We were shocked! The children from Dharavi have homes, go to school and live in a place of richness and importance to the rest of the city.

But that was just a sour start that we soon sorted with a little anger, a little passion and a bit of pointless paperwork. The manager then came to meet us and was a nice young man that let us participate in the activities! The rest was a day of fun and memories, not only for the children but also Sytse, a fellow intern, said it was his best day in India so far!

The children got involved in clay-making activities, painting, getting tattoos painted on their arms, and some of the bold ones even got on stage to sing the audience a song. They walked around the festival curiously eyeing what caught their attention, listened to music, watched capoeria, ate wada pao and returned after a day of pleasurable enjoyment!

Our new friend, James Subudhi, came to visit our Shelter a few weeks back and spent the Sunday volunteering with us.  He spent a memorable day with the children and learnt a lot about richness of Dharavi. What James mentioned the most about his visit was about the happiness of the children and the strong sense of community that he saw in this place. He has written an extract which I have posted below which he calls Of Magnets and Development.

All of us—kids, mothers, teenagers, strangers, and volunteers—huddled in a circle looking down into the sewer drain just outside the door to the shelter. “Paul is going to kill us,” Dipti said. The gravity of tiredness pulled on my face as I looked through the metal grate into the stagnant sewer.  I thought about what might be in there to give the liquid a greenish, purple and black grey thin goo consistency: shit, paint, spit, pan, dirt, the piss of everyman in Mumbai, motor oil, rusted scrap metal, water, diphtheria, typhoid, polio, cholera, and more piss.  A Dharavi sewer drain was as far away from the chilled bottled of water and masala dosa I wanted than Christmas is from July.  The wheels in my head quickly turned toward a destructive and money driven solution… breaking the lock and just buying a new one. Simple.

Out of the corner of my left eye I saw a kid running towards us.  He perched, knees bent, butt hovering above the ground, his arms out stretched over the drain. One of shelter participants pulled and held the gate open, the boy on the ground dropped a magnet on a string in, and another guided it around the drain by pulling the string in different directions.  A minute later my jaw dropped.

“Those keys need to be washed. They are very dirty” a little girl said.

The moral of the story? The kid’s local solution was more efficient than mine. We didn’t have to break the lock. We didn’t have to spend money on a new lock. We didn’t have to wait in line at shop to purchase a new lock.  We didn’t have to feel Paul’s wrath. And I probably got my lunch quicker this way than through my solution.

Contrast this event with how development occurs and how land-use decisions are made in Mumbai. The government and market solution to the locked door with a lost key down the drain would have been to demolish the building for a use that would squeeze the most profit from the property, like finding the right size hand to squeeze all the water out of a sponge.  In the process they definitely would not have listened to anyone in Dharavi, especially youth.

Yet this event is exactly how decisions about development, land-use, and community problems can be made in Dharavi, with youth and residents generating and implementing solutions to problems and a vision for the future they see with some guidance and resources from ngos, government, labor, and business. 

Whatever it is that Dharavi needs or wants, and how those needs/want can be met,  what it’s future can and should be,  what it is, what its problems are, and how they can be solved, should decided by and led by its residents, yet within at least one limit. That limit is of allowing no one, not the government, ngos, businesses, land owners, a resident, or community to have a monopoly on the truth, morality, and what is right and wrong, because we can all be right and wrong.

 On the one hand ngos believe the community and its residents have knowledge that is superior to their own and that of the government, to create an argument that the community deserves a seat at the table when decisions are made or least have those making decisions listen to their voices. While community residents often know things about their neighborhoods better than someone who doesn’t live there, they can be wrong. I’ll mention now that some of the kids from the shelter wanted fish the keys out of the sewer with their hands. Yet it is hard for ngos and activists to accept the fallibility of the community’s knowledge when the government and businesses are so much more powerful than they are, through their monopoly of the truth, law, and implementation of the law. Yet without recognizing their fallibility and that government, business, and other stakeholders besides community residents can be right, the community will be unable to form alliances with stakeholders besides ngos to get the resources and policies they need and want to create the changes they want and expect.

On the other hand, government and business are so corrupt that they believe they and they alone hold the truth and morality in their minds and hands that they refuse to engage community residents in the land-use and development decisions that impact them. This believe is based on using cost benefit and analysis and the logic that what makes the most profit and costs the least within their standards is right.

Government, business, labor, and ngos often go as far as to think that they are so right that they are objective because they use mathematics to support their arguments. While mathematics is an objective tool (a squared plus b squared equals c squared wherever you are on Earth), its use as a tool in deciding what to measure, how, when, and why is subjective because they are based on the desires, wants, and beliefs of the people making decisions. The government could believe that drinking water with ecoli in it is healthy, and contract out the distribution of water to a company with the requirement that ecoli be in it. This would save money because the company would not have to treat the water for ecoli. And it might even be profitable if people assume the water is safe to drink. But it’s not in the interest of health.

What I believe Dharavi needs to create a healthy and sustainable future are methods of participatory development and land-use decisions that involve a variety of stakeholders, a commitment from NGOS to secure resources to implement the ideas that come out of those processes, and residents who are trained to organize and advocate for resources and policies to implement their shared vision and solutions to problems.   

James is raising money for our Shelter by playing a show on February 19^th  in New York. Do drop by if you are around. I am sure it will be a great show!