It's hard to imagine a place like Dharavi. One thinks of hell on earth, but what is that really?
Theological texts describe hell as a netherworld in which the dead continue to exist. It is said to be the realm of the devil and the demons in which the damned suffer eternal punishment.
Even the pagan Greeks had a concept of hell, perhaps best exemplified by the sentence of Sisyphus, condemned to roll a massive boulder up a steep hill only for it to fall back on him each time he approached the summit. This for eternity.
But Dharavi is very real, a vision of hell in our time. Sitting on just over 400 acres in the northern reaches of sprawling Mumbai, India's largest slum sits on the confluence of two rail lines, along a former creek bed that seethes with sewage and the collective waste that spews from 10,000 small "factories."
Dharavi is home to 1 million souls. They have virtually nowhere to bathe. Children play in festering pools of debris. There is no regular garbage pickup in this hell.
And, like most of the world's most embarrassing places, tourists have not been exposed to Dharavi, and its residents have been spared the indignity of discovery.
Or at least that was the case until a rather engaging Brit named Christopher Way decided to launch a tour company with his Indian partner, Krishna Poojari, called Reality Tours and Travel. For a little less than $7, tourists can take a three-hour, guided tour. Traveling in an air-conditioned vehicle costs a bit more.
This is a branch of our industry that is not all that new. Known as "poorism," these tours enable visitors to take escorted coach tours of the poor townships of South Africa, the awful slums surrounding Rio and even the train stations of major Indian cities where the "lost children" can be found sleeping huddled in corners. In fact, India is something of a leader in this field. The Salaam Baalak Trust takes tourists on two-hour tours of the slums of Delhi where the street children are the primary focus of interest.
London's Evening Standard newspaper has written about poorism, decrying the willingness of some travelers, for example, to pay good money to sleep with a family in an "8-foot-square" indigenous shack in the Soweto township of Johannesburg, South Africa.
I contacted Way at his office in Mumbai. I wanted to get a feel for the thinking behind his entrepreneurial effort. I am not at all impartial about this. I think it's out-and-out exploitation. I don't think you need to "tour" poverty to know it exists.
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Q: So let's see if I've got this right: You take tourists through some of the world's worst slums, including Mumbai's Dharavi, which you bill as the "largest slum in Asia." On your Web site you invite the visitor to share in the humor of the slum dwellers. You're not serious, are you?
A: I'm not sure that we invite the visitors to share in the residents' humor. They don't stand around together having a good laugh, but Dharavi is not a depressing place. People do work hard, and there are obvious problems which exist, but there is a real sense of community, and people get on with their lives. And -- dare I say it? -- I'm sure that a lot of them are genuinely happy. It's not a place where you will see people sitting about feeling sorry for themselves.
Q: The name of the company, Reality Tours, might imply to some that other tour operators are selling "unrealistic" tours in the destinations you cover. Is that a fair assumption?
A: Most other tour operators, including ourselves, run more traditional sightseeing tours, and I think this kind of sightseeing has its value. One gets a sense of the city's history. But our tours offer the tourist a glimpse of the reality of daily life of a lot of people in Mumbai. The fact is that about 55% of Mumbai's residents live in slums.
Q: I understand you do other tours, but this is the program that got you on the map, and you obviously believe in the concept. I think what I hear you saying is that the majority of places on our planet happen to be poor, and if you haven't seen this aspect of a destination, you haven't seen how the majority of the Third World lives. Have I framed your belief correctly?
A: When I visit a country, I like to try and understand its people and try and get amongst them. What interests me is not so much its distant history, including museums and architecture, but the lives of its people. Give me a vibrant market any day to a museum (although some museums can be very interesting). So we are extending this same philosophy to the slum tours.
Now it just so happens that the majority of the residents of Mumbai live in slums. So if you don't see a place like Dharavi, then naturally you won't have seen how the majority of people live. At the same time, I don't judge those tourists who don't wish to see this. We understand this isn't for everyone.
Q: I'm trying to imagine the thoughts of the slum dweller living in an infected hovel as one of your guides leads tourists past the door. Tell us a bit about the mindset of the residents. How do they view the strange onslaught of tourism in their midst?
A: Firstly, Dharavi is not an "infected hovel." It's a vibrant, energetic place with people working hard and living in areas with generally a great sense of community. Dharavi is a "legal" slum with government facilities such as toilets, water and electricity. There are other slums in Mumbai which are more like hovels.
There are about 1 million people living in an area of 0.7 square miles. That's obviously quite a few people living in a very small area. The people here have very little privacy anyway, so it's not as if we are invading this private lifestyle. They are used to seeing people.
We follow the same route, and the residents get to know the guides, and we explain to them what we are doing, including how we put back into the community. We have small group sizes, have a no-camera policy and we don't peer into the residents' houses.
The tourists are also respectful and polite, which the residents seem to like since the area does have a negative image in the minds of many people in the city. We have had some negative publicity in the local press, but not from the residents themselves.
Q: Are you telling me that the locals welcome and benefit from the footprints of travelers through their wretched lives?
A: The people there are either indifferent [because] they're too busy or uninterested or they welcome us. Kids in particular come up and speak to the tourists, and many of the elder people ask questions as well.
Q: You've got an audience today of some of America's best travel agents and tour companies. Who, in our industry, should be working with you?
A: I'm not too worried about who wants to send their customers to us, just so long as the customers themselves are on the tour because they wish to be there. What we are doing is proving to be very popular. We give a very good, caring service, and so tour operators should think about offering our services.
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Nothing, of course, is ever as simple as it seems, and I would point out that Way's groups are limited to five people so as not to be overly intrusive. He has indicated that when he starts turning a profit, a morbid thought to some, he will turn 80% of the slum tour profits back to projects that benefit the residents of Dharavi.
Contributing editor Richard Turen owns Churchill and Turen, a vacation-planning firm that has been named to Conde Nast's list of the World's Top Travel Specialists since the list began. Contact him at [email protected].