Lounge Loves | Dharavi—The City Within
In a new anthology, Dharavi is broken down to some of its revealing humdrum details
Intimate encounters
The Dharavi narrative is hyper descriptive, replete with adjectives and metaphors. It is cleaved like a wedding cake, The New York Times once reported. The infamous epilogue to the Mumbai story, its biggest slum and inner city, has attracted journalists from all over. In all these fabulous pieces, the attempt to find new prisms and add new meanings to the Dharavi story is usually sorely obvious. Dharavi is such a place. It has inspired movies and tourism, art and novels.
In the new anthology, Dharavi—The City Within, edited by Joseph Campana, there is no descriptive or impressionistic excess. The reporting in these pieces, distributed in four sections, is of the classical kind—refreshing when it comes to writing on Dharavi. The macro-policy picture is in the background, with an excellent analysis of Dharavi’s “migration autonomy" model and its “citysystem" by Jeb Brugmann and Kalpana Sharma’s scrutiny of its redevelopment plans, among a few others.
The Dharavi dialogue is old, and in need of a rethink or overhaul. Extreme sympathy bordering on naïveté about its so-called efficiency by development sector thinkers and extreme exoticization by foreign media, both fuel the idea that one of Asia’s largest slums stands only for something great and celebratory about the human race. Having acquired this pop-mythical status of an urban symbol has had little impact on Dharavi’s progress. If you visit it, its most astonishing feature is still that by any standard, it is an unlivable place.
Informed, dispassionate reporting on Dharavi can only be a good thing. Dharavi—The City Within is a worthy addition to any hefty collection of journalistic non-fiction.
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