First thing, look around Dharavi

It so happened that my 14-hour travel to Bombay was spent in a luxurious first class train cabin.

A young woman, her baby daughter and father-in-law shared the 6' X 6' space with us. After talking for a while, I found out that she was just 25, and was forced to drop out of Florida University 3 years ago for her arranged marriage. Now, many sacrifices later, she is a mother, and has finally grown to love her husband. Fiercely religious, and undoubtedly confident in her life situation, she was convinced that love marriages were much more likely to end badly. She was a strong example for her case.

After a most glorious sleep, I woke up to check out the view out the window. The worn glass was a yellowy filter that transformed the suburban landscape into tea-stained vintage photographs.

Immediately after I got into the city, checked in at a travel accommodation north of the city, showered and ate, I met up with an awesome friend of a friend, Dwijen, and headed for Dharavi. Located in the middle of Bombay, this maze of a shantytown is one of India's largest slums. It is home to something like 60% of the city's population (over 1 million) and is taking up 0.67 square miles of Bombay's most central and valuable land. Currently, one tiny retail space can sell for about $20,000 USD, and the slum is turning in $1.5 billion USD per annum. Residents have an internal banking system made up of door-to-door, personal-to-person interactions. All of the produced and most of the goods are imported and sold locally. A few years from now, this community will be a ghost. Having had a glimpse of the controversial urban phenomenon from the train, I was itching to check it out.

We approached the edges of Dharavi along one of Bombay's highly congested north-south highways. Skimming past the road-side commercial face, we stumbled across this wicked shop that manufactures giant industrial mixing bowls from recycled metal. I think these men were in the middle of a business deal when we barged in.

We dodged the relentless traffic by taking the the first available opening into Dharavi. The street was wide, shops aplenty, people going about their business (delivering, selling, negotiating..). The place looked exactly like the roadside towns that I've seen a couple times prior. Except this was denser, maybe even cleaner, and everyone was calling out “Hello! How are you? I'm fine thanks!” I guess they had gotten accustomed to all the foreigners that came through on regular “Slum Tours”. The deeper we walked, the narrower the streets got, and more personal the encounters were .

Main street. All commercial, some residences above.

Smaller arteries, light traffic.

Residential alleyways.

Everyone had a specialty.

Sprawling pipework.

There's no farmland in or around the city. Produce is imported.

Seemed like the women worked way harder than the men.

Everyone wanted a photo. These kids got pretty rowdy after a while and Dwijen was worried.

I've gotten used to these crazy photo sessions now.

This was so sweet. Dwijen saw a crack in a wall and told me to go in. It was a dark and crammed bakery in full swing. The room was probably 50 degrees. These sweat drenched men were making what I will find out later to be a crucial ingredient in the best street snack ever!

He asked if I wanted to try. The other men were fighting for the attention of me and my camera behind me.

So I obliged.

This kid was quietly doing his thing in the back.

Dwijen said that I could probably walk into any establishment and the locals will be as friendly as ever because it's exciting for them, it would be a story to tell their friend sand family.

Dwijen also told me that he'd never visited Dharavi though he's lived in Bombay all his life. He is a proponent of the revitalization project largely for the reason of accessibility. Though negotiations on this land have halted, change will certainly happen eventually. He even showed me another slum area that has been completely cleared and replaced by one of the many new fly-over highways that have sprouted all over the city in the last 5 years.

The city has transformed dramatically over the last decade and will will continue to change into next. This transformation also includes the changing attitudes of the new generation. Unlike any other place I've visited so far, many girls in Bombay are clad in revealing modern fashions and almost all of them are in “secret romances” that their parents don't know about. I thought back to the young mother I met on the train and that knew girls like her will get progressively harder to find.

The city of Bomaby is now called Mumbai, major landmarks are also being renamed to give the city a new identity. Dwijen said that the city's new ways are encroaching very rapidly and the people are not adapting at the same speed. Him and his friends still call their city Bombay; most residents of Dharavi refuse to move their homes and businesses into concrete blocks; many “love marriages” still have to blossom in secret; and I, as an outsider, can hardly relate. I left Dharavi late that afternoon and headed towards the smoggy silhouette of central Bombay in the distance. As we ascended onto the buzzing 6-lane highway, the slanted metal roofs slowly sunk out of view.

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