A Traveler's Library » Slumdog Millionaire

A Conversation with Shelley Seale about India

pen4hire — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:32:32 +0000

Shelley Seale and friends in India

Destination: India

Book: The Weight of Silence, Invisible Children of India by Shelley Seale

Readers of A Traveler’s Library have continued to turn to the articles about Slumdog Millionaire, and the response posts from Monica Bhide. So when Shelley Seale‘s book, The Weight of Silence, Invisible Children of India, arrived on the scene this month, I was eager to talk to her.

Today, I am going to give you part of the e-mail inteview I did with Shelley, and in two weeks, I will return with more about her book and her reading recommendations for travelers to India. Shelley supported the charity, Miracle Foundation, and her first trip to India was as a volunteer for that group. I asked her how that made her experience different than that of an ordinary tourist.

Shelley: I think it probably did create quite a different experience than I would have had otherwise. Caroline Boudreaux of The Miracle Foundation did an excellent job of preparing us for the culture shock of India, as well as for the children and the volunteer work. Of course, it can never be fully described and you can never be fully prepared for it – I remember how overwhelmed I was at first, both by the country and the sea of children who surrounded me the first night I arrived.
India was the most alive place I had ever been – it wrapped me up immediately and refused to let go. It still hasn’t.
In India everything is on full view, nothing is hidden – both the incredible, magical beauty and the frantic poverty that does not let you rest.
Its rawness of life strips away the unnecessary – distractions, superficial attachments, trivial worries. … life becomes fundamental, only the essentials of being, and causes you to be fully present in your own existence.

Shelley says that people who are trapped in their own preconceptions find it

— far too easy to be shuttled from place to place, safely cocooned in cars and five-star hotels from which they gaze out at the spectacle passing before them. They dutifully traipse around the Taj Mahal and Varanasi with their video cameras before returning home, perhaps with the feeling that they’ve missed something essential. But they never really saw India.

I asked what she thinks about slum tours and how she liked the movie Slumdog Millionaire.

The filmmaker Mira Nair (The Namesake, Vanity Fair) made a movie in the 1980s called Salaam Bombay, about a bunch of street kids very similar to those in Slumdog Millionaire. Like Slumdog, she used actual street children in the film, not actors. They were paid and trust funds set up for them, and then she used the proceeds from the movie to start a non-profit called Salaam Baalak Trust with her mother, Praveen. I interviewed Praveen Nair for my book. SBT works with street children and helps rehabilitate them, providing clothing and education and other resources. Now, in Delhi and Mumbai, actual SBT graduates lead visitors on tours around the city and show them the real heart of these places, not just the tourist stops.

I myself went on such a tour in 2007, with Deepa Krishnan of Mumbai Magic tour company. Deepa had introduced me to the nonprofit Akanksha, which I profile in the book. They provide schooling for kids living in slum communities, and Deepa donates a third of her company’s profits to the organization. Deepa took me to Dharavi, the slum where much of Slumdog Millionaire was filmed and widely regarded as the largest slum in Asia. It was an incredible, eye-opening experience. She introduced me to women making pappadam bread while their toddlers hopped around them, and men making clay pottery by the hundreds. Dharavi gave me a resounding rebuttal to the myth that poverty is the result of laziness. I have never seen people work so hard in all my life. The place abounded with an industry and entrepreneurship such as I have not ever witnessed anywhere else. It was an amazing experience, and I believe that things like this can do a lot to eradicate cultural bias and misunderstandings, and also the images of poverty that many of us have.

Deepa herself said it best when she explained it to me. “This is the Mumbai of the aspiring migrant, with his fierce drive for survival, for self-improvement,” she said. “The Mumbai of small enterprise. The Mumbai of poor yet strong women, running entire households on the strength of their income from making papads. Every morning, these women put food on the table, braid their daughters’ hair, and send them to schools. Dharavi is one place where this third Mumbai is visible. They have hope for the future, you see? This is the Mumbai of dreams.”

I loved the movie (Slumdog Millionaire). … But what most people don’t know is that there are 25 million kids living in India under circumstances like those portrayed in the movie. For these kids, this is their everyday reality – without the fairytale ending.

Thank you Shelley, for allowing A Traveler’s Library to be part of the launch of The Weight of Silence. I look forward to reading your book and sharing more of our conversation with readers.

Readers: Will you be reading The Weight of Silence? Do you think westerners can do more to help?

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Seeing Mumbai, Part One

pen4hire — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 08:00:00 +0000

WELCOME ALL MONICA BHIDE FANS! Thanks for visiting, and I hope you’ll considering coming back often, or subscribing with that big orange button to the right.

Our guest today is Monica Bhide, a fine writer and an expert on Indian food. Her latest work is Modern Spice. Monica wrote a moving essay on her blog which was posted at Facebook after the terrorism attack on Mumbai. I knew that she might have some different ideas than those I came away with from Slumdog Millionaire. Today and tomorrow she responds to my original post.

I was not born in Mumbai nor did I grow up there. I have never lived there for longer than a few months at a time. And yet, as a writer, it is the destination that I have written about the most.I have written love stories in yearning for the city’s seafood, I have written essays on my Mumbai-based idols, I have written pieces on how to shop in Chor-Bazaar, the Thieves Market, what to order at the Taj and the craziness of the fish markets. Mumbai has given me inspiration, it has given me dreams, life-long friends, a zest for learning the local language so I could understand all the bad words being hurled around by street kids, and it gave me the love of my life – my husband.

What is it about this city that makes everyone who lives there call it “Amchi Mumbai” (My Mumbai) and what is it about this city that makes people like me lose their hearts somewhere between the street food vendors and the glamorous shopping arcade at the Oberoi? The short answer is the people. They have a spirit and a love of life unlike I have ever seen. They have a determination to make their city thrive, no matter what. And I think this is what was central to Slumdog Millionaire.. the spirit of the people, it is why the movie succeeded, I believe.

To your question of not wanting to visit after you saw the movie, well, I can understand why. But if you feel that Mumbai is only about those slums, you couldn’t be more wrong. Yes, there are slums in Mumbai, but that is just one part of the city. There are also glorious monuments, fantastic eateries, and places where the real estate is more expensive than in Tokyo. That is also Mumbai. Mumbai is India’s nerve center, much like New York City is to the US.

There have often been comparisons made between the two major metros: they are the financial capitals – NYC has Wall Street, Mumbai has Dalal Street; they have major populations – Mumbai was 14 million at last count; they are melting pots of cultures and languages; they are home to major food establishments and businesses; they are cities where dreams come to build a life; they are places where even wanderers can find a home.

There are differences: Mumbai is also the host for India’s movie industry, has strong religious undercurrents, and yet Mumbaikars are equal opportunity devotees and the Lord Ganesh offers his blessings to one and all, religion not withstanding; and monsoons still define the way of life. I have seen movies about gangs in NYC, about the people who live under the city.. that does not stop me from wanting to visit what I consider to be an absolutely glorious city – I just stay away from the areas that I feel l don’t belong in or want to see particularly.

Tomorrow Monica tells us about her encounter with one of those areas of Mumbai that deeply affected her. If you like what you are reading, please click on one of the social networking buttons below.

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Announcement: Response on Mumbai

pen4hire — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 01:03:39 +0000

I am happy to announce that on Friday, March 13–our lucky day–Monica Bhide will respond to the post on Slumdog Millionaire and slum tours. Monica is a native of India and loves Mumbai, so we hope to learn from her a different point of veiw about visiting that Indian city. And accomplished writer of books and articles, Monica also writes a food and culture blog called A Life of Spice.

She says of herself: ” I love tradition but embody change.
I respect technique but am playful.
I eat locally but cook globally.
My writing reflects food and culture and its affect on our lives. ”

Come back Friday to see how Monica Bhide adds spice to our conversation.

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Nice Movie To See, but Do I Want to Go There?

pen4hire — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 04:56:17 +0000

Mumbai Stop Light

Welcome to A Traveler’s Library. If this is your first visit, I hope that you will stick around. Be sure to read the two response posts to this one, which I link at the end of the article. And if you are curious about that book mentioned in the first paragraph, it is about the Dominican Republic.

I recently finished a wonderful book that killed any desire I might have had to go to the place featured, and then I saw the Academy Award winning movie Slumdog Millionaire, which definitely did not make me want to visit Mumbai. I began to think about the anti-travel movie. And the don’t-go-there book.

Is there such a thing? Although I have not read the book that Slumdog was based on, I have read comments that say it portrays Mumbai as even grittier than the movie. Does this make me want to travel there?

Controversy still rages (on Twitter for instance) about the depiction of Mumbai in the Academy-award winning picture. Most Indians whose comments I have read are not happy. One said on Twitter, “Would you like it if America were portrayed by a movie that showed only the slums of New York?” Uh, well, there have been quite a few movies that do not show America in the best light. But perhaps because movies set in India are rarer in the United States, the impact of Slumdog has been greater. American movies, set in America, are widely viewed around the world, the good, the bad and…all that.

But back to the question of whether Slumdog Millionaire might make people actually want to go to Mumbai. I began to hear another discussion which caught me by surprise. Slum tours, it seems, are newly chic. Some call this kind of tourism ‘Poorism.’

Do the profit-making companies that lead these tours actually give back to the communities as they claim? What motivates people to go on such tours? Is it voyeurism? Isn’t all travel ultimately voyeurism? Do the slum tourists come away changed in any way? Will they be more sensitive and generous in the future? Will the inhabitants of the slums learn how to make a legitimate buck off the tourists, or will the bad guys among them simply hone their pickpocket skills?

Eric Weiner, author of The Geography of Bliss, discussed the tours in a 2008 New York Times article. You can learn more about one of the tour companies that he discusses, Reality Tours, at their web site.

For now, I only know that for me, I am not interested in visiting a place to look at the lives of the poorest, and I am wary of traveling where I fear that I will be isolated in expensive resorts or hotels from the regular street life because it is unsafe, unhealthy or simply unsavory. Call me unadventurous, but that’s my thought.

I am sure of one thing…the people who run tours in the slums of Mumbai are going to do a lot more business because of Slumdog Millionaire. As to the two main questions here–whether I am totally missing the point of Mumbai, and whether slum tourism has a place– I have an open mind. So educate me. Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.

Oh, I mentioned a book up there in the first paragraph. I’ll get around to that soon.

See the posts that followed this one when Monica Bhide replied with her take on Mumbai in two parts. And if you enjoy what you see at A Traveler’s Library, please subscribe by RSS or e-mail–you’ll see opportunities in the right hand column. The link attached to the title of the movie will take you to Amazon where you can buy the DVD. It won’t cost you any extra, but it will earn a few cents for A Traveler’s Library. Thanks.

Photograph by Mike Powell, Flickr, Creative Commons license

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