Dwelling In (On) Bombay Cinema

Part A: An Extended Prologue
use Dharavi land for economic benefit in public-private partnership
projects under the image of slum rehabilitation. A similar
story is told in Vertical City (Kishore, 2010), a film-essay that outlines
the dystopic vertical rehabilitative architecture proposed for
slum dwellers. The documentary successfully communicates the
spatial oppression and repetitive failure of the government in
dealing with the issue of rehabilitating slums. In many ways, the
documentary demolishes any hope that government-run projects
that relocate the poorly housed can benefit anyone with the exception
of private investors. The replaced houses are often far from
useful infrastructure like water, building maintenance usually not
included as part of the contract, and houses are usually provided
miles from their original workplaces, thereby disrupting an otherwise
regular economy. Days of malfunctioning elevators eventually
become years of malfunctioning elevators, resulting finally
in paralysed dystopic buildings that have come to symbolise the
displaced, economically-paralysed urban poor.
Many a time, foreign intervention has helped reveal unique and
otherwise concealed aspects of slum life. Notwithstanding the
work done by Danny Boyle in his Oscar-nominated Slumdog Millionaire
(2008), the most popular of such work is the two-part
Kevin McCloud series called Slumming It (Simpson, 2010). Slumming
It is one of the first such audio-visual investigation to have
been labelled “poverty porn” (Thompson, 2010). Perhaps under
the same label, one can categorize the new wave of YouTube videos
that have surfaced such as the video by the channel “bald and
bankrupt” called “Exploring An Indian Slum // Dharavi Mumbai”:
the video features an adventurous western male walking
around the Bombay streets attempting to comprehend the chaotic
organisation of Dharavi. Similar videos have been made as part of
foreign research interests or personal documentary interests like
“We Spent A Day In The Largest Slum In India | ASIAN BOSS”
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