Poor Little Rich Slum

Poor Little Rich Slum by Rashmi Bansal and Deepak Gandhi offers us a peak into one of the world’s most famous slums – Dharavi. 

I’ve never been to Mumbai (so many years since it has been renamed and I still prefer calling it Bombay). It is the only metro in India that I haven’t visited yet but I have heard so much about it that it is high up on my wish list. I hope to explore it sometime in the future. However, I am quite sure that I probably wouldn’t be dropping into Dharavi. 

I really doubt if any Indian – except politicians, researchers, the religious, social workers or those who live & work in slums and those who avail of their services – would voluntarily step into a slum, unless forced to and especially not on a vacation. Somehow, Westerners seem to be enamoured by India’s slums. Call it an after effect of Slumdog Millionaire (a nice movie although why it won an Oscar is puzzling!) the spotlight seems to be suddenly shining on an entity which we Indians usually tend to ignore. Most of us are so used to seeing slums in our cities that we are pretty much oblivious to them. 

Mumbai’s famous slum has been covered a lot in recent times – but almost always by foreigners. Hence it is interesting to note that Poor Little Rich Slum has been created by Indians with a focus on the spirit on entrepreneurship in Dharavi. Also, I think that the book is written specifically for an Indian audience too - because there are a lot of quotes in Hindi for which no translation has been provided. The book has a coffee-table-book quality to it – although it is quite slim. It is made up of short, easy-to-read chapters, each talking about the bigger picture of Dharavi through the smaller stories of its inhabitants. 

The book is peppered with photographs – most quite fascinating while some, well, how do you capture filth and dirt beautifully? But the stories themselves and the enterprising people we meet during the course of the book are nothing short of inspiring. There are days when we, the privileged, seem to crib about the silliest of things in our lives; moaning that it is too hot to get any work done or that our neighbours were too noisy to let us sleep in peace. Therefore it is amazing to realize how much can be achieved with practically next to nothing – except courage, determination and perseverance. 

It is clear that the soul of Dharavi is its people. There is Jameel Shah - whose shoes are patronized by Bollywood biggies, Hanifabi and Salma – crusaders who are help women battle domestic violence, Panju Swamy – whose idli stall is Dharavi’s connection to South India, Faheem and Tauseef – the bright, young founders of Be The Local Tours & Travels and so many more resourceful people who have risen above the poverty, the uncertainty and the chaos that surround their lives; people who have not let their hopes and dreams to be overwhelmed by their circumstances. 

Perhaps because the negative aspects of Dharavi have already been well documented in mainstream media, this time the authors have tried to portray a different side of Dharavi by showcasing its positive points instead. Poor Little Rich Slum shows us that Dharavi is a lot of things to a lot of people; a place to call home, a workplace to earn a livelihood, a school of life, a novelty for tourists, a curiosity for outsiders and most importantly, a place that offers numerous opportunities for survival - but one which also pushes you to test your inner limits.

Anger: Vice… or Virtue?

I’ve always been someone who loses her temper easily. Everyone who is close to me know that I can fly off the handle quickly – you can say that my short temper is one of my flaws. I do think that I’ve somewhat learnt to control it – although I agree that I have a long way to go still. Now, I accept that blowing your fuse at the drop of a hat is definitely not a good idea, yes blind fury can be dangerous. However I also believe that the sentiment of anger has received far too much flak. It has even earned a spot among the 7 deadly sins. True, too much of anger is bad – but does anger by itself deserve to be tagged as an inexcusable vice? Is there not such a thing as "responsible anger"?

There are times in life when one needs to get angry. Take for instance the recent public outrage on women’s safety in India. It was only because the people of India were angry at the injustice meted out to one unfortunate young woman in December, that today women’s safety is being discussed at the international level and both the people and the government are atleast beginning to sit up and take notice.

Or let’s talk about the recent news about IPL spot-fixing. Were you not angry that a few louts cheated an entire nation? Your anger is justified. Or when you hear about child sexual abuse? When you see an alcoholic husband abusing his wife? Or when you find out that your partner has been cheating on you? When a rogue hand in a crowded bus sneaks up and pinches you? Should one not get angry? Well, I think you should. You have every right to be angry. You deserve to be angry. 

Some people may ask – what is the point of getting angry? What is it going to achieve? Indeed it is anger that prompts us into action. Whether that action is positive or negative is upto you. When someone passes a sexist comment on you and you don’t get angry, it simply means that you are too conditioned to accept sexism. You need to get angry. But if you get angry and then declare to the world that all men are perverts, that is not only stupid but it is also useless. Instead if you channel that anger and talk about it to spread awareness about sexual harassment, that positive action validates your anger. 

If you are stuck in an abusive relationship and allow yourself to be exploited instead of getting angry that you are being ill-treated, it can mean that you don’t love or value yourself enough. When you choose to leave a cheating partner, there will be nights when you feel all alone and miserable; when the urge to call him/her is eating you alive. But then, deep down, that tiny spark of anger must burn – reminding you of all the times that the jerk has let you down and hurt you and broke your trust. And that anger will give you the strength to help you let go of any self-pity or remorse and move on with your life. 

Or even getting angry with yourself. If you've set a goal and find yourself slacking simply due to laziness, get angry with yourself. Scold yourself . You don't have to put yourself down but you could give yourself a pep talk - by being angry at your laziness - and push yourself to achieve your goal.

In fact, I think more people should get angry. Angry enough to stop paying bribes and to report corruption. Angry enough to vote for responsible leaders and throw out the useless ones who have been looting the country forever. Angry enough to stand up and raise your voice against inequality. Angry enough to question wrong-doing.

People say that we can achieve true happiness when we are not affected by external stigma – but when you read about an 8 year old girl who was raped by a 60 year old man – your blood should boil; you should be outraged; your conscience must be troubled. Even the Gods get angry - Jesus got angry when he saw that the sacred temple of God had turned into a dirty marketplace, Kali is known for her fierce temper and Shiva’s temper is feared by one and all. And if the Gods themselves can lose their tempers, surely we mortals are allowed to get angry?

Hung Up On Accents

It’s funny how a language, any language, can be spoken in so many different ways. Take for instance, my mother tongue Thamizh. It has so many variations ranging from the robust Chennai slang to the melodious Coimbatore one, the sing-song Thirunelveli Thamizh and the rustic Madurai one. The same goes with Hindi, with various parts of India contributing to it with their own slang and accents. Likewise with English. My most favourite accent in the world is the British one but it so interesting to observe all the other accents and my! How many of them! Scottish, Irish, Cockney, Australian, Yankee, the Southern drawl etc, etc. While I cannot imitate any accent I am fascinated by the way an inflection here and a clip there adds so much layer to a language.

But one thing that definitely does not catch my fancy is the fake accent that many Indians seems to adopt after only a few years of living abroad. I can understand if someone with Indian origins but was born and brought up abroad or has grown up abroad speaks like an American (or British). Sure, I love listening to Hugh Grant or James Bond. But if you start rolling your r’s literally as soon as your foot touches foreign soil, I’m sorry buddy, but you ain’t fooling no one!

I fail to fathom the thinking behind putting up a fake accent. Can’t these people hear themselves speak? I mean, the accent is so fake that anybody can see through it. I cringe visibly whenever I hear it and just feel like screaming, "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!". Most people who suddenly seem to be speaking “American” cannot do it consistently. So half of their words sound American while the rest sounds quite desi and the amalgamation of this frankly sounds rather embarrassing. What is so wrong in speaking with an Indian accent anyway? As long as you pronounce words as they are supposed to be pronounced – as in Zero instead of Jero as I’ve heard some people say - and you are able to communicate smoothly, is it really so bad to speak the Indian way?

In fact, I’m not too sure with what accent I speak English but if I do have one that would probably be a Thamizh accent – which is natural as I come from Tamil Nadu. When I met with some clients in the US a few days after I moved there for work, an American lady told me that I speak English very well. As long as people are able to understand you easily isn’t that enough? Do people who speak with these fake accents think that it is beneath them to speak normally? Do they feel that they are somehow superior if they can speak in the American way? If so, well here’s news for you – you don’t. You simply sound ridiculous. So, I beg you, for the love of God, cut it out. My ears are aching. Enough is enough.

The Expat Life: Ajman Museum

Museum Entrance

I finally managed to haul my lazy self to the Ajman Museum. I've been meaning to visit it for couple of years now, but somehow kept delaying the trip. The museum is situated in a central place very near to the Ajman bus stop. It isn't a particularly large one - you can probably complete the museum tour in an hour. But it is quite well maintained and gives us a peek into the history of Ajman. There were only a handful of people apart from me so I could really have a look around at leisure and take lots of photos without worrying about crowds. Entry fee: 5 AED per adult. Timings: Daily - 9 - 1 & 4 - 7. Closed on Fridays.

Narrow staircases

One complaint I had was that there didn't seem to be any museum guide to explain things to visitors. Of course, there were boards that explained stuff in both Arabic & English - but it would have been good to have a knowledgeable person who could answer a few questions that I had. Also, the museum is not very accessible to differently-abled people. There were many narrow steps that would have made it difficult for people with disabilities.

The museum is actually an old fortress. It consists of several rooms housing old photographs, official documents, weapons, musical instruments and also several tableaux representing scenes from everyday life of yore. One can learn a lot about the various traditions and trades of the Arabs through these lifelike scenes. Here are some pictures that I clicked in the museum. 

A tableau depicting a village scene

The evolution of weaponry: from bows & arrows to spears to daggers to guns

A domestic scene

The Arabic spice souq

An old-fashioned cafe replete with hookah et al!

A doctor of traditional medicine. Am I glad for advances in  the medical  field!

Arabic crockery & jewelry

Old official documents: Driving License & Passport. (Notice that it says Rs.5? Not sure why!)

Various traditional trades: Upholstery | Pearling | Rope Making & Basket Weaving

Various traditional trades: Blacksmith | Baker | Barber

The Bedouins in the desert

                                                           Arabic coffee anyone?

                                                         Musical instruments

                                                                          A Wooden Door with Carvings

A quaint Arabic tradition:

When a person is sick, a religious leader is requested to write verses from the Koran onto a plate using a  mixture of saffron & rose water. Then the plate is washed with rose water and the solution is given to the person who is ill to drink or is applied on affected body parts.

The Expat Life: 5 Things I Like About Living In Ajman

I often find myself cribbing about how where I live in the UAE – Ajman: how hot it is, how boring it is, how dusty it is or how nothing ever happens here. But then I paused and thought, surely it can’t be all bad? There must be some advantages of living in Ajman; afterall every place has its own positives and negatives. Also, I get a lot of enquiries from people around the world asking me how life in Ajman is. So, today I decided to try to be an optimist and look at the bright side for a change. Here are 5 things I like about living in Ajman:

1. Home delivery of groceries: makes it to the top of my list by a huge margin! As any home cook – or atleast a sloppy one like me - will tell you, running out of that one vital ingredient when making a meal is a frustrating experience. Usually, this means that first I have to change out of my curry-stained-and-faded-pyjamas, brush my straggly hair, and run to the grocery – thus interrupting my hurried cooking process and disrupting my routine. But the great thing about living in Ajman is that you can simply call your neighbourhood grocery and even if it what you need costs just a couple of dirhams they will bring it to your doorstep in no time!

2. Living near the beach: I’m a Piscean and I’m from Chennai – how can I not like the beach huh? The majority of my life has been spent in a city near the beach and I never tire of it! I have many fond childhood memories of the beach and I’m really happy that Ajman has a nice beach. It is the perfect place to spend a pleasant evening with the wind ruffling your hair and feet sinking into the soft sand.

3. Small & compact: Ajman is rather small. This means that it takes only a short time to get from one place to another in Ajman. In fact, most of the time, my husband comes home from work for lunch – he gets a fresh and healthy home cooked meal and we get to spend our respective lunch hour together. Since we need to cover only short distances there is hardly any irritating traffic jams either to delay you.

4. Affordable rents & uninterrupted utilities: When most people back home complain about suffering in the sweltering heat due to frequent power cuts, I am so thankful that we have uninterrupted power over here. Touchwood! Further, I have lived through several of Chennai’s severe water shortages where we had to constantly worry about running out of water, remembering to fill every available container when the water comes only during stipulated time slots and running like mad to get to the Metro water tanker when it comes around sloshing half its contents on the road. So trust me, it is truly a relief that we also have uninterrupted water supply – which is kind of a big deal since Ajman is a desert, albeit a developed one. Plus, the rents are far more affordable than in the neighbouring emirates of Sharjah or Dubai – which is why a lot of people who work in Dubai prefer to live in Ajman.

5. Feels a bit like India: Ajman doesn’t feel “foreign”. It doesn’t have the glitz and glamour of New York or the sterile orderliness of Singapore – it does not even have the quaintness of an English suburb. What it does have is, kids playing gully cricket, men lounging around in tiny tea stalls, Hindi or Malayalam conversations carried by the wind, restaurants around every corner serving fish curry or chicken tikka and loads of people from the Indian sub-continent – now surely, an Indian wouldn’t feel out of place in Ajman would he?

So, there we go! 5 things that make Ajman a – well, I still won’t say great – but yeah, nice enough place to stay! What do you like about where you live?

One Amazing Thing

One Amazing Thing by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an uncomplicated tale of humanity.

One Amazing Thing by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is the story of 9 people who are thrown together by an act of nature. Nine different characters – Uma, a young Indian woman brought up in the US, Jiang, an old Chinese-Indian lady settled in the US and her granddaughter Lily, Tariq, a young man of Indian origins but brought up in the US again, Mr. & Mrs. Pritchett, an elderly couple with a strained marriage, Cameron, a black man with a past, and finally Malathi and Mangalam, the staff - find themselves trapped by an earthquake at the Indian Consulate in America. How they hold onto hope while learning about each other and coping with the predicament that they have suddenly found themselves in, forms the rest of the story.

I guess I always try to find a little bit of myself in the protagonists of all the books I read. In this one, this particular sentence about one of the characters, Uma, caught my eye: “When flying, she always chose a window seat so that when the plane took off or landed, she could look down on the tiny houses and imagine the lives of the people who inhabited them.” Yep, sounds like me alright!

I am a big fan of Chitra Banerjee after reading The Palace Of Illusions. I enjoy her writing style and the thoughts that they provoke in me. In One Amazing Thing, I also enjoyed her sense of humour. For instance, “The pain in her wrist was still there, but like a nagging old relative to whose complaints she had grown accustomed.” -  Don’t we all know that relative!?

I also really liked the way she describes several names – Farah: “…like a yearning poet’s sigh”, Flurry’s: “…a delicious name that melted in one’s mouth like the lightest of pastries.” Lovely, no? I went back and repeated the names to myself – marvelling at how appropriately the author managed to capture the spirit of these names.

To keep up their flagging spirits and for want of anything else to do, the group starts sharing stories. Each person tells a story from their life – through which we learn about the hopes and fears, the dreams and disappointments, the plans and mistakes that fill each of our lives. 

Each story gives us a peek into the lives of the protagonists and makes us understand the reasons behind why they are who they are. Of all the stories, I found Jiang’s and Mrs. Pritchett’s to be most moving; the former for being a victim of unfortunate circumstances and the latter for seeming like she had it all – only to discover belatedly that she didn’t in fact.  Malathi’s story was rather predictable, while Tariq’s was quite expected in today’s Islamaphobic world.

One thing that I didn’t like in the book was its open ending. I hate open endings – be it in movies or in books. I do not like it when the author leaves readers hanging in the balance, wondering whatever happens next and left to draw our own conclusions!

But apart from that, One Amazing Thing is a relatively simple story. The Palace Of Illusions was a complicated book  - given that it was a woman’s point of view of the great epic Mahabharat, which explains the multiple layers and dimensions. One the other hand, One Amazing Thing is a straight forward book that reiterates the fact that life- and people - is never black and white. 

P.S: Around the time that I was reading this book, a major earthquake struck Iran and we felt the tremors all the way here in the UAE. This is the second time I've felt an earthquake, but that was a spooky coincidence indeed!