Mumbai - the Indian dream?

Mumbai, to a large extent, had an uncanny resemblance to Karachi, the city where I spent a large part of my adolescence. Hence, it was natural for me to constantly compare my city with Mumbai, especially since it is in our nature as Pakistanis to compare ourselves with the ‘enemy’ that we are completely fascinated with and can never get tired of hearing from our ancestors when they migrated sixty odd years ago. The only difference between their anecdotes and the reality I experienced was that the gora sahib (white man) was replaced by a new class of people; the English speaking, Levis clad, McDonalds chewing upper class of Mumbai. Of course Pakistan (for once) could boast an equally large number but it was the stark inequality between the haves and the have-nots that was immeasurable. Today thousands of families live, eat, bathe on the footpaths of the colonial roads that perhaps were made from the sweat and blood of the ancestors of the very same people now sleeping on them. Maybe life for them never changed; the viscous circle of poverty continues, the children grow up to have more children of their own and then leave them behind to continue the lineage of the pavement dwellers. Truly, they are the subaltern.



Of course Karachi too has its invisibles and this trip was an eye-opening experience in the sense that it made me understand as well as contradict the common perceptions about slum dwellers are migrants or worse, responsible for their own misfortune, the ‘problem’ in the city, the barrier to a clean, green ‘world class city’. It was a new concept for me to understand that when people come together, especially women, they can achieve great things by pooling in their resources, not only in terms of money but their time, their effort, their passion and most of all their trust and belief in an innovative, almost radical idea and collectively struggle together, despite the economic, cultural and bureaucratic obstacles that they know they will inevitably face but never actually lose hope for twenty odd years is phenomenal. I can not forget what a Mahila Milan leader said to me, “Look what we have achieved, even the Municipality is learning from us now”. To her, the respect that she had gained outweighed the tangible benefits that she had struggled for all these years. In a sense, she had obtained her rights as a citizen.

Most of all I came to understand that there is a sort of a butterfly effect taking place; an action, decision and/or policy in one part of Mumbai or the state of Marahashtra itself can have multiple effects in any and/or every part of Mumbai. Moreover, the family or household unit to a large extent does not have the sole responsibility for what happens to it; there are so many wider overarching forces taking place that constantly shape the final outcome. For example, the rent control act so many decades ago in one part of Mumbai may possibly lead to the settlement of a slum dweller’s family in another part of Mumbai as a result of the high land prices all over Mumbai. The city therefore is extremely dynamic, which makes it all the more exciting and challenging to work with. The revelation of causal relationships, across time as well as at one particular time in place, was one of the key aspects of the MSc. degree that I will take away from DPU and in that sense the fieldtrip was a classic case that illustrated the practice of theoretical frameworks like the Web of Institutionalization (and some others that we did not work on but which would have been interesting to do so).

In conclusion I feel that the normative and value-based nature of academia does not fit very well with the practical life vis-à-vis the relationship between consultants and the client. It is truly a daunting challenge to remain diplomatic and at the same time give constructive criticism to your client. For the first few days, I felt frustrated at the lack of freedom I had in arranging meetings with stakeholders or pursuing a line of thought that interested me but was not at all relevant for the client. At times I also felt that the ‘consultancy’ was not holistic in nature; all the angles and critiques were not fully considered. Most of all, the tricky balance between remaining neutral and objective and at the same time passionate about the case was extremely difficult, if not, impossible to acheive. In a sense, consultancies and the medical field have many similarities; we are the surgeons that can not get attached with their patients in case our judgment gets clouded and our diagnosis gets biased. Hence, in the end we provide reports that outline the complexities and suggest our recommendations on the basis that we have met our “patient” only a few times and try to cure the problem only at the surface and leave the tumor for some other specialist to take care of.