My Daily Life in the SLUMS OF MUMBAI (Life-Changing 5 Days)

Two and a half years ago during my very first visit in India, I spent two days walking all around the slums of Mumbai. And even though I got to learn so much about the life in the slums, I didn't really have the chance to live inside the slums. And so I left with more questions than answers. So now that I came back to India for the second time, I decided to go back to Mumbai and actually spend five days living inside Dharavi, which is one of the largest slums in the world. This is how it looked. At the end of the 19th century, Dharavi was a sparsely populated village inhabited by Kohli fishermen. Then the slums were established in 1882 during the British colonial era and grew exponentially fast due to the expulsion of various polluting industries from downtown Mumbai. Throughout the years, millions of people have reported to Mumbai from rural India in search of a better future. And some of them settled in Dharavi. This led These days, Dharavi is one of the largest slums in the world, housing up to a million people. Since there's very little government regulation, it has become a hub for entrepreneurs and a place of incredibly cheap labor. It is estimated that the annual turnover of Dharavi is somewhere around a billion US dollars, with most of their goods being exported overseas. In the 21st century, Dharavi has become a topic of interest and mystery for millions of people due to the publicity it received from movies like Slumdog Millionaire and books like Shantaram. As for me, I'm not a scientist or a researcher of any kind. I simply wanted to learn more about what life was like in the slums of Mumbai. I knew I would find this experience eye-opening. I just couldn't have predicted how much. It is 12 p.m. in Mumbai. I'm a few kilometers away from the slums and I'm finally going there. So my friend who lives in the slums, who's called Praveen, is already waiting for me. I'm gonna pack my stuff and take a taxi to meet him. It's been almost two years since I last saw Praveen and I was incredibly happy to finally meet him again. Once we met, we started exploring the slums right away and made our way to one of the biggest markets in all of Dharavi that was completely packed with people. There's literally thousands of people buying and selling stuff. There's kids going home from school, there's all the vegetables, fruits, clothing, electronics and everything else you can imagine. It didn't seem like all of the food stalls were properly sanitized but the locals told me the products were fresh. So I dug in. Popcorn for 15 euro cents. Now that's a good deal. Let's try. Then we kept on exploring other areas of Dharavi, passing through dozens of tiny crowded lanes. I'm gonna try playing cricket for the first time in my life right now. Right now. After a couple of hours in the slums, I asked Praveen if I could use the bathroom somewhere. He said no problem bro and we ended up here. In those houses, these houses, these houses or these houses, people don't have any toilets. So everyone just crosses this street and goes to the public toilets right there. Every single day over 2,000 people use this public toilet and it costs only 5 euro cents to get in. They have toilets on both sides. This side right here. Every single door has a different toilet. It turned out the day I arrived to Dharavi was a really important celebration across India called Guru Purnima. It is an Indian festival dedicated to spiritual and academic teachers during which the students pay their respects and express gratitude. Praveen brought me to a tent where everyone was paying their respects to their spiritual teacher Saraswati. The atmosphere was really festive and everyone got as much free food as they wanted. I couldn't resist it too. Just got some free food but here they're not providing a spoon or a fork. So you need to use your hands. Which is what will do. By which you are gonna taste because the food becomes more tastier. It becomes more tasty? Yes. Everyone was really excited that I came to the festival and they brought me on the stage which was quite a unique experience. The event is over now and everyone's leaving for the procession with the drums. Eventually we hit the streets and spend hours parading all across the slums. The police have stopped the whole traffic in this intersection so that we could pass literally in the middle of the street and now the Guru is going to get on this cart and the procession will continue. Late that night Praveen took me to the place that would become my home for the next five days. I'm finally going to the place where I will be staying for the next five days. It looks like a proper slum. There's many small houses, a lot of noise, dark lanes. Sometimes there's some lighting but not always. I'm here. Yo Praveen. Oh wait I need to leave my shoes. It is already 11 pm at night so I guess it's the end of the first day of me being in the slums. But so far it's been awesome. Right now I'll just go straight to bed. I'll try to wake up early next morning to once again explore as much as I can. This morning I went downstairs and everyone was taking a bath and then my host said so where do you want to take a bath? I said I don't know I'm too lazy to take a bath. And then he said no no no no no. If you live in the slums you have to take a bath every single day. No exceptions. So I guess it's time for my morning bath eh? So start with the feet yeah? Fresh. Feeling of freshness. And for your head do you guys use like a shampoo? Okay let's use the soap. I'm gonna be a healthy boy. After the shower we had a quick breakfast and continued exploring Dharavi. That day Praveen wanted to show me the only non-urbanized place in the slums. So we walked to the edge of Dharavi and hopped into his friend's raft. How do you like it Praveen? Yeah it's good man. It's good? It's really good. How do you feel man? Good. You want to swim? You want to go swimming? Later on. Some minutes later we arrived to this really tiny fisherman's village where we met up with a few more of Praveen's friends. We just came to some small island and look at the color of that water. It's even more interesting eh? They have a floating platform right here. Then a bathtub right there. It didn't take me long to understand why this place was so incredibly important to Praveen and his friends. It was their only getaway from the hustle and bustle of life in Dharavi. Now we're going to some sort of another swamp that's much bigger than this one apparently. And also Praveen told me that no foreigners have ever visited this place. Only the local people who live in these tiny houses or huts somewhere there. That side is garbage. That side is relatively clean water. So they have this water drainage system where basically the fish from this side they cannot pass to that side to the garbage. And whenever the water level increases on that side the water without the garbage can flow to that side. It's Lucas's house. Yeah. Cool. You have some images. Grandfather and father here taking a rest. Yeah. So they also sleep here or just rest here? Fish catching. Yeah. So they catch fish here, here and then they rest here. The place wasn't the cleanest but the guys didn't seem to care all that much and made the best of their time in the nature. The woman in the boat now has a helmet. Let's race guys. Who's going to be first? It's a land of a village and we like very much this place. Would you like to live here? Yeah, really. This is a small island. They say it's the small Thailand right here. Coming here was like going into a time machine that took me hundreds of years back to the end of the 19th century when Dharavi was just a group of tiny fisherman's villages housing only a few thousand families. A few hundred meters later I was taken back to the 21st century where I could see the mind-boggling contrasts between the fisherman's village, the slums and the high-end office buildings that were so close to one another yet so completely distant at the same time. This is still the swamp side. That's a super black river and these are already the slums. Someone's building their house right now. We're so close, literally three meters away. Though I don't think you can cross this part so easily. Bye-bye. Bye. From then on I would wake up early every morning, have myself a refreshing shower either inside or outside. Yes. Ah, I feel so fresh. Then I'd get something to eat and spend the whole day exploring. Throughout those few short days we went absolutely everywhere from children's playgrounds to workshops where Praveen's friends worked to busy intersections and tons of other interesting places. A couple of times I borrowed my friend's motorbike and drove to a few of the many other slums in the area. Some didn't look that good but others surprised me with incredible views. We just came to one slum that's just by the sea. The sea is right here. The waves are really strong today. So apparently everything is wet, even the walls of these houses. I didn't expect this but some of the slums we visited were so clean they didn't feel like slums at all. The slum we're visiting right now is extremely clean and every hut is basically a house. So it doesn't really look like a slum. It looks like a normal cute area. The houses are colorful. That's a pink one. That's a yellow one. Blue one. The red one. The orange one. The yellow one. The white one. And the best part is there's no smell. It feels clean. It feels very beautiful and very well preserved. We also checked out a few areas in the slums that the government redeveloped into proper apartment buildings. We just entered one of the houses. Apparently it's not allowed but we're gonna try to reach the top. I don't know if it's gonna work. Would you look at the view? So apparently this whole area used to be slums. Right now this part is still the slums but everything around it became a building. So they would demolish the huts and these tiny buildings and build something like this and give everyone a flat. And the same thing happened here where I'm standing right now. This is a huge apartment building that used to be slums. No one can stop the slums. Slums will be ever with us. One of those days Parveen told me we could go rooftopping. At first it seemed a bit weird to randomly walk on people's roofs in the middle of the day. But Parveen told me no problem bro and off we went. Everyone thinks Hong Kong is the place to go rooftopping but it turns out it's Dharavi. Look at this huge huge tree that's growing right out of the roof. There's a temple downstairs. We're hanging around on this roof next to the tree. I don't know how many roofs we've been on but it seems like 50 or more. There's hundreds and hundreds of huts all around this area and apparently you can go on most of them as long as you don't break the roof because it's someone's house. Look at all of these houses everywhere. In every single one of them there's some people. So here someone is drying their clothes. There someone's cooking I think because I can smell it. And in every single house there's at least a few people right now. And apparently there's someone down there also. Hello namaste namaste. On my last day in Dharavi I had a super fun morning dance battle with Parveen. Then we made our way to the local train station to check out how the millions of people of the slums commuted to other areas of Mumbai every single day. We're approaching the train station to take a train that crosses all of Dharavi. It's only two stops but we can see literally the whole slum. There's the train. That's the cabin. Pretty packed I would say. Oh the train's beginning to move. Look at these poles man. There's so many people outside. I can actually touch the poles if I wanted to. This is so cool. Today is my last day in the slums of Mumbai and as any sensible person would do I decided to get a clean professional shave for 30 US dollar cents. I know this might look a little different from your ideal barber shop but this guy was a total pro. He gave me a proper clean shave in no time. We forgot disinfectant for good measure. The five days that I lived in the slums of Mumbai opened my eyes in ways I couldn't have imagined because I got to spend so much time with the local people who completely transformed my outlook on what their lives were like. You see as most outsiders I had a very distorted view of the people of the slums. We grew up hearing stories about them dying on the streets, no one being able to read and write, kids having to sleep surrounded by flesh-eating rats and so on. There are of course tons of problems that need to be addressed especially when it comes to sanitation. For example sources say that in Dharavi there is an average of one toilet for a thousand people. Also livestock generally lives in the same quarters with people and that combined with the fact that the local water sources lack cleaning facilities sometimes causes the spread of contagious diseases. I am obviously in no way knowledgeable enough to know of all the intricacies of life in the slums. However people there are just like everywhere else. They have their own dreams, goals, careers, thoughts and emotions. They are in no way different from the rest of us. It is said that Dharavi is the most entrepreneurial place in the world and I found that to be very much true. Most people I met had something going for them. Some were running their own workshops or small factories. Others had their restaurants, shops or food stalls. Not only that a lot of the slum dwellers actually worked in those big office buildings for various technology or financial companies and simply lived in the slums to save money on rent which is incredibly expensive in Mumbai. There were some astonishing success stories too. Take my good friend Shailesh. He was born and raised in Dharavi and started his online business at the age of 22. The business took off a few years later and now Shailesh runs a six-figures online business, employs 12 people full-time, goes on vacation every once in a while and supports his whole family. It doesn't matter where we come from. We are all equal. Some of us are born with golden spoons in our mouths. Others are not. But that doesn't define us. What defines us is our pursuit of happiness, our compassion for others and our ability to adapt to whatever circumstances we're in and make the best of them.