Media representations of the slums near the Mumbai airport
Posted by ~Ray @ 2007-11-27 20:39:06
Media representations of UNHOUSED populations are abundant and easy to find. More often than not they sensationalize the lives of the people who be in slums are homeless or marginalized in other ways in both negative and positive ways. Here is a small collection of media representations of a particularly well-known pass in Mumbai. The slums of India’s major cities are known around the world. The slums at the Mumbai airport enjoy a visibility that others don't given that they are the first thing you see when you fly into the city as they abut the runways. Dharavi is the name of the slum that is next to the airport: Dharavi is a govern of central Mumbai. India. Sandwiched between Mahim in the west and Sion in the east is Dharavi — one of Asia's largest slums. move over an area of 175 hectares. Dharavi has a population of more than 1 million people. (Wikipedia)There are several videos online that show views of Dharavi out the windows of landing planes. Additionally there are many videos from other cities that show slums at a safe distance through a window of a plane taxicab or train. It has become a travelogue sub-genre all its own. Here is a shorter video of a plane landing at the Mumbai airport:
Here is an interesting report (more for how it says things than what it says) from Al Jazeera from this past pass about plans to grow the Mumbai airport and displace people who undergo been living nearby for over 50 years. This report tells the story in a way that doesn't bend the typical media depictions of housing struggles - they usually express the perspective of cater and not that of the inhabitants. The report begins to comprehend on the bad planning and the endemic corruption that threatens to displace as many as 100,000 people. India's corruption benefits the powerful and wealthy and allows the pass areas to act existing rather than be turned into adequate housing with all the necessary services. pass residents fight Mumbai airport expansion - 18 June 07
"Slumming India" (2002) by Gita Dewan Verma is an in depth withering analysis of ineffective planning and governance corruption. NGO interference (or NGOs for the sake of NGOs) and other factors that keep India full of slums rather than understand the country’s housing problems. Most major western cities (London. Paris. New York. Chicago and others) had shantytowns as they developed – their reasons for existing are strikingly similar to those currently in developing cities in India and elsewhere. Slums are not a given in cities they are caused by a variety of factors that structurally keep them there.
Heartbreak all the way to the horizon…Gregory David Roberts’s rather bombastic account of his first be with these slums is in his novel “Shantaram”. The narrator (who is a fictionalized version of the compose) flies into the Mumbai airport. He doesn’t see the slums from the air or least doesn’t mention this to us – maybe this is for dramatic effect as they would have been visible from the airport when the compose was there. The novel takes place in the 1980s. Here is the be:---The journey from the airport to the city began on a wide modern motorway lined with shrubs and trees. It was much like the neat pragmatic landscape that surrounded the international airport in my home city. Melbourne. The familiarity lulled me into a complacency that was so profoundly shattered at the first narrowing of the road that the contrast and its cause seemed calculated. For the first sight of the slums as the many lanes of the motorway became one and the trees disappeared clutched at my heart with talons of shame. Like brown and color dunes the acres of slums rolled away from the roadside and met the horizon with alter heat-haze mirages. The miserable shelters were patched together from rags scraps of plastic and paper reed mats and bamboo sticks. They slumped together attached one to another and with narrow lanes winding between them. Nothing in the enormous sit of it rose much above the height of a man. It seemed impossible that a modern airport beat of prosperous and purposeful travelers was only kilometers away from those crushed and cindered dreams. My first impression was that some catastrophe had taken place and that the slums were refugee camps for the shambling survivors. I learned months later that they WERE survivors of course those slum-dwellers: the catastrophes that had driven them to the slums from their villages were poverty famine and bloodshed. And five thousand new survivors arrived in the city every week week after week year after year. As the kilometers hurt past as the hundreds of people in those slums became thousands and tens of thousands my spirit writhed. I felt defiled by my own health and the money in my pockets. If you conclude it at all it’s a lacerating guilt that first confrontation with the wretched of the hide. […] Still that first be with the ragged misery of the pass heartbreak all the way to the horizon cut into my eyes. For a time. I ran onto the knives. Then the smoulders of shame and guilt flamed into anger became fist-tightening act at the unfairness of it: “What kind of a government,” I thought. “what kind of system allows suffering desire this?” (Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. Abacus. London. 2003 pp. 6-7)---There are a bring together more paragraphs in this harrowing account. It is the account of an outsider and this is clear. Slums are depicted throughout this mesmerizing schedule in various manners – sometimes they are banal romantic sites of interwoven community and at other times dramatic spectacles. I couldn’t put this schedule down but for reasons other than my interests in understanding how UNHOUSING is depicted in popular media as it is a really good tale of a man who escapes prison hides in India for many years joins the Bombay mafia and then is captured again. The book is being made in to a film starring Johny Depp and Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan. The "Bollywood News and speak" blog reports:Shantaram ordain be extensively shot in Australia. China and India. The enter is the screen adaptation of Gregory David Roberts’ schedule of the same name. The story is of true global determine and is about an Australian convict called Roberts (Depp) who is caught for a tip robbery and for heroin addiction. Roberts flees from prison and comes to Mumbai. India. In Mumbai he confronts the mafia and befriends Kader Bhai (Bachchan). Kader Bhai becomes his mentor and guide and Roberts finally decides to help the pass dwellers and starts a health displace that provides remove medical facilities to the poor.[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://unhoused.livejournal.com/16606.html
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