by Stefan Gates
I want to see if there's any truth in this theory, so I'm off to Mumbai, India's 'City of Dreams'. I had booked some flights, but then I found out that there was a train. I've always had a romantic (OK, neo-colonial) dream about travelling across India by train. I imagine a dining carriage with crisp napery and be-capped staff. I imagine a slow, colourful and dreamy journey, with me reading books about the proud, noble dalit, and sitting in white linen trousers with the wind ruffling my hair, Michael Palin style. I am convinced it will be a life-changing experience.
The reality is very different.
The Indian railways are the country's biggest employer, and the company seems to be working hard to find jobs for all those people with layers of bureaucracy and quadruple bookkeeping. It takes two hours just to get my bags booked onto the train. The train itself is a clanking, wheezing, spluttering hunk of battered iron on wheels. I find my carriage in second class and my disappointment begins to grow. The seats are all plastic, the windows are tiny and mud-caked, the place stinks and there's no privacy. There's no crisp white napery, no be-capped staff and we are told by our fellow travellers that the journey will be 27 hours of slow, trundling agony. Or at least, it's supposed to be 27 hours.
People are fascinated that there are Westerners on their train, and they come up to me and stare. Sometimes they will ask questions, such as 'Where are you from?', but it's mainly just staring. A surprising upside is the food. Stewards constantly pass along the train offering plastic trays of pakoras, samosas, curries and chai. I avail myself of their wares at every opportunity throughout the journey, eating some sphincter-searing chillies and making up for the last week of deprivation.
I hate sitting on my bunk, barely able to see out of the window, so I wander to the end of the carriage and jam open one of the carriage doors with my leg, and settle down to read Untouchables by Narendra Jadhav, who broke the caste mould and escaped from his cycle of poverty and persecution to become an eminent banker, and to watch India pass by.
It's not exactly Palin-esque, but I love watching India unfold as the train trundles painfully slowly through the countryside. Every travel writer on the planet waxes lyrical about the chaotic beauty of India, but amidst the beauty is the ever-present grinding poverty. And from my vantage point I see it all: mile upon mile of rice fields, millions of ramshackle huts full of people, filthy kids playing in the dust, the pressure of 1,000 million souls scraping a living from a country the size of the USA (population a mere 300 million). The land is overworked, ruined and wasted for miles and miles, but the fields are full of people working, the stations are full of people selling food and drink, and at every level crossing there are hundreds of people standing with their bicycles, pressed shirts and beautiful saris on their way to do something. Indians always seem to be busy, always striving, always going somewhere.
What strikes me most about India, though, as we travel through the countryside, is the incredible mix of smells. Rural India smells strongly of sewage and human excrement, but oddly enough it's not a bad smell. It shifts and evolves as I travel across the country, and it gets combined with the smells from animals, people, cooking, agriculture and even wine. We go through a district of vineyards that seems to go on for miles. They aren't planted in the anal-retentive style of European vineyard, but they look pretty good.
As night falls, I return to my carriage and the seats are pulled down into bunks. Suddenly I am hijacked by a group of engineers, one of whom has heard that I'm making a film about food and insists that I try some of his mother's home-made bhajis and brinjal (aubergine) curry. 'She's a terrible cook,' he says, but they taste great to me. The men are all tremendously friendly, and we chat for hours, even though we're all desperate for some sleep.
Finally they leave and I crawl into my plastic bunk. This is going to be a sweaty night. I fall asleep pretty quickly, but in the middle of the night I'm woken up by some people who get on the train and claim they were originally allocated these bunks. My bribe to the train steward clearly didn't do any good. I bribe another one and apologize profusely to the new passengers, and they wander off to a different carriage, a little disgruntled.
When I wake I take a tour along the train. I've been in air-conditioned second class (there doesn't appear to be a first class carriage), but a few carriages down is 'second class, no air con', and people are crammed in a little tighter at three bunks high as opposed to our two. I meet Muralie, a polio victim from a lower caste who survives by sweeping the train for tips. He tells me that his life has been ripped apart by caste conflict.
'My father was a daily wage labourer but we were given a plot of land by the government because of my disability. The villagers killed my father because of the plot – they belonged to the upper castes, the Brahmins and the Thakurs. They smashed in his head, put out his eyes, and his limbs were twisted and broken; finally he was hung upside down.'
Stories like this are common across rural India and atrocities against lower castes have risen dramatically in the last year, allegedly instigated by upper castes with the prime motive of grabbing land.
When I finish interviewing Muralie, he becomes aggressive, asking what I am going to give him in return for the interview. I explain that I am making a film about the caste system and food, and that perhaps it will help to have his story told, but he wants me to give him money. I explain that the BBC doesn't pay people for interviews. He's disgusted with me. What can you do for me? He keeps repeating. I wonder if I'm abusing these people in some way. I'm not here to change the world, but to tell its stories and perhaps somehow that will help to force change. But it's true that none of this will help Muralie eat tonight.
I continue down the train and find third class. There are bunks here but there's such a desperate crush of people that at least a quarter of the passengers have had to stand for the last 20 hours. The few that have a seat are perched on top of each other, and it takes me an age to get anywhere. I stop and talk to some of them. Many are dalits from rural Bihar who've managed to scrape together enough cash to escape, and are hoping to leave their caste behind to start a new life in Mumbai. They are lucky, they say. Most people aren't able to leave – they can't find enough food to eat, let alone save money for a train ticket. Many of these people have family living there who will give them somewhere to stay, but it's going to be difficult.
Back in second class I speak to another dalit, Rajesh, who says, 'I am going to Mumbai for the first time. I have my people there. There are so many friends. Some of them drive auto-rickshaw, some drive trucks, some sell vegetables. If I have some talent, I would like to use it.'
Half a million people migrate from rural India to Mumbai every year, often to escape the dalit hunger-poverty trap. Rajesh says that hunger is used as a way of suppressing his family: 'In villages this is a big tragedy. People suppress the working class; they make sure that the working-class people remain uneducated. They make an effort to stop them from going to school. They want the labour class to remain in the dark.'
City of Dreams
I finally make it to Mumbai, Lord knows how many hours late. I'm exhausted from lack of sleep, but excited to be here at last. My enthusiasm wanes a little when my luggage is held to ransom by a succession of people who demand bribes for its return in the form of 'import tax'. This appears to be a fluid amount, there are no receipts available, and no justification, despite the fact that the man demanding it clearly works in a local government office. Indian bureaucracy is so mesmerizingly complex that people use it as a tool for all sorts of extortion. When I finally buy my luggage back, someone else comes up with another tax that I need to pay. Four different people need to be paid off before I am reunited with my pants. Suddenly Mumbai doesn't seem so welcoming.
My anger and frustration evaporates, however, when I discover that all the hotels in town have been booked up for the arrival of the Chinese president, and the only rooms available are at the ultra-luxurious Taj Mahal hotel. The BBC has managed to find me a more customa
rily drab hotel for the following night, but for one night only I will sink into the incongruous luxury of fine linen and fine dining offered by the Taj. Sadly, by the time I arrive it's too late to enjoy anything the hotel has to offer, such as the pool, and I've got such an early start in the morning that I won't really get to enjoy it, but hey.
Do I feel guilty that we've left rural poverty and landed in the lap of luxury? To be honest, I'm too tired to let it worry me, and I collapse for a good night's sleep and let it slip from my mind.
Mumbai is as fabulously wealthy as it is destitute. It has a rapidly expanding middle class, shops full of fancy clothes, cars and assorted bling, as well as the largest, most miserable slum in Asia. The contrast is odd, and I find it hard not to feel anti-wealth. I have to remind myself that just because there are impoverished people in India, it shouldn't mean that others can't earn good money. The gap is admittedly vast, but who am I to tell people that they don't deserve to enjoy their wealth – in India or in Britain? It's all too easy to resent the wealthy for their money, but I do have this residual hope that although some inequity is inevitable, wealth ought to filter down through society eventually. Certainly, the contrast here in India is hard to bear.
We visit Indigo, the most exclusive restaurant in Mumbai. It's full of the rich, the powerful and the beautiful, plus a fair smattering of braying American bankers. The owner, Ravi Anchan, has an army of staff working in his kitchens and a lot of them are dalits benefiting from the money that the rich spend. What the poor of Mumbai need are jobs, and caste is irrelevant to him. 'The only real class divide, as in any cosmopolitan city, is money. Caste implies a certain amount of fatalism, whereas money doesn't. Everyone has the chance to go after that great pot in the sky, especially in Mumbai.'
He gives me a free dinner, and I sit on the open-air terrace. It's spectacular, and I could be in a fancy Indian restaurant in the middle of London or New York. When I leave, however, our taxi has to take evasive action to avoid running over a woman sitting in the middle of the road howling and crying, holding her hand out for money.
Dnaravi
Dharavi is the biggest slum in Asia, and home to more than 600,000 people. Over half of them are dalits who have migrated from rural India in search of a better life, but most of them live on less than £1 a day. When they get to the city of dreams, this is where most of them end up. There's no running water, healthcare, rubbish collection or proper housing. It's a sea of tiny shacks, with people crammed on top of each other in a shocking concentration of humanity, and all of them living amongst raw flowing sewage. The place smells horrific and in many ways rural life in Paraiya seems idyllic in comparison: at least in the country there is ample space, beautiful rivers to wash in, places for kids to run around and play.
But the difference is that in Dharavi there is hope. It might sound sentimental, I know, but it makes a world of difference here, where, for all its faults, the anonymity of the city makes it a meritocracy and systematic caste discrimination is replaced by the slightly less rigid discrimination of poverty.
One of the most horrific things about Dharavi, though, is the relentlessness of it. There's no escape from the poverty, filth and discomfort for the residents; they can't take a break from all this hell and sit in a park, or go for a walk. The people who live here have to endure it constantly. There's nothing in Dharavi except more Dharavi, and it goes on for miles.
I meet a few people, and they show us the extraordinarily small spaces they live in. This is an affront to human existence. One woman shows me her tiny room, about the size of a small bathroom. She tells me that seven people live in it. I can't actually see how seven people could lie down here at the same time.
There's a set of steps at the back. Where do they go?' I ask, wondering if she has another room.
'They're for the family that lives upstairs,' she says, pointing to a platform that sits precariously above her room.
Other rooms have no light whatsoever, but one woman proudly shows me her TV and shrine inside her dingy black hole of a room. Some others have stereos and bicycles, although they are rare exceptions. But they have managed to move here and get jobs, they hold their heads high and they are relatively optimistic amidst the squalor.
I meet a young man called Ramprakash who arrived a year ago and survives by selling children's shoes that squeak with each step. His tiny shack is clean but extremely difficult to live in. I buy a pair of his shoes for my daughter Poppy, and have to practically fight him to accept the money. It comes as a shock to me that he rents his shack. Even in slums, you can't just build a house from wood and plastic sheeting – every scrap of land is owned by someone, and they will want to be paid for it. Ramprakash rents his shack from a dalit who has managed to escape the slums.
But amongst all this, I finally discover a real story of hope. Twelve million people in Bombay live in its various slums, trying to escape the cycle of poverty. One way of getting out is to become a dabbawallah. These men (always men) are tiffin-carriers – porters who take people's tins of packed lunch to work for them. Most middle-class Mumbaians want to eat homemade food in their office, but don't want to carry it on the crowded trains. It seems to be a snobbery thing – it's just not done to be seen to carry your own tiffin, and if you can afford to get someone else to do it, why not? If it sounds ridiculous, it is, but it's another way that wealth feeds down to the poor. For a small fee, they do the carrying for you, picking up the tiffin box from your wife after you've left home, and delivering it to your desk. They also pick up the old tin from yesterday's meal and it gets delivered back to your wife again before you get home. Most dabbawallahs never meet the person they deliver the food to.
I went on the rounds with a dalit dabbawallah called Ballaral. He told me that despite the wild complexity of the system, he never delivers a tiffin box to the wrong place. Over 200,000 lunches are delivered every day by around 5,000 dabbawallahs, and Forbes magazine recently claimed that there's only one error in every 6 million deliveries.
It's particularly ironic that Ballaral does this work, when in the countryside he wouldn't be allowed to touch the food of a higher caste member for fear of contaminating it. Higher caste children regularly abused Ballaral when he was growing up in rural India but here he has shaken off the stigma. It's been replaced by a simpler poverty prejudice. 'Some people don't let us into their home when we go to get the tiffin. Sometimes people even refuse to give us water.'
But at least it's better than systematic caste discrimination, and now that he has a proper job he can support his two children and his parents, as well as his brother, and his brother's wife and son. He earns £60 every week, which is a princely sum in Mumbai.
He says, 'I have a ten-year-old son and an eight-year-old daughter and by the time they grow up the caste system may be over. But I might not live long enough to see that.'
A week after we left, dalits rioted across the country demanding an end to discrimination.
• • • • •
India is touted as an emerging economic superpower, and it has one of the largest economies in the world. But the media tends to ignore the fact that it damn well ought to have one of the biggest economies, seeing as it has such a vast population. Over half of the world's hungry live here, for crying out loud, and 25 per cent of all Indians live below the poverty line. And all the hype about the modernity and dynamism of the country is lost on anyone who's really explored India. The place is a mess: its infrastructure is dire; it's desperately poor; and its turgid, bloated bureaucracy and endemic corruption is hampering progress.
I wish the best of luck to the middle classes, and the new technology companies and industry of India, but those 25 per cent who are desperately poor expose the grubby underbelly of all that progress. And with corruption, patronage and caste discrimination all alive and well, the wealth of those middle classes might never filter down.
The best memory I have of my time in India (and please excuse me if this sounds sentimental) was a
moment as I left the Dharavi slum. On the side of a football-pitch-sized sea of raw effluent and rubbish was a large wooden box on legs. I peered into it and got the shock of my life. Inside were four beautiful little girls, all around six or seven years old. I asked what they were doing. 'Homework,' they said in Hindi. Then 'Hello, mister,' in English. And I sat with them for a while, giggling and pointing at the book they shared. And that's the image I took away from India: four beautiful little flowers of hope, sitting literally raised above the slurry, studying for a better life and wearing smiles as brilliant as rays of sunshine.
CHINA
Cooking with
Communists
POPULATION: 1,321 million
PERCENTAGE LIVING ON LESS THAN $2 A DAY: 46%
UNDP HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX: 81/177
CORRUPTION PERCEPTIONS INDEX POSITION: =70/163
GDP (NOMINAL) PER CAPITA: $2001 (107/179)
FOOD AID RECIPIENTS: n/a
MALNUTRITION: 12% of the population
I'm hurtling towards a love affair at around 865 km/h. If all goes to plan I will land in Beijing in another four hours or so, and shortly afterwards, I expect to fall head over heels in love with the place. I should admit right now that despite all the cultural and historical importance, as well as the sheer size and power of the place, I've never really understood China. I've never felt affinity or empathy, even though my first-ever girlfriend was born there (OK, we were four and we only ever held hands, but still). I do have several things in common with the Chinese, however: like me, the Chinese are obsessed with food; they have a natural love of weird and wonderful ingredients; and they aren't shy of adding a bit of drama and spectacle to mealtimes. So I'm hoping that food is the perfect way to get under the skin of the Chinese, to understand a country that's changing at a bewildering pace and to try to understand what makes the world's next global superpower tick.
