Tourism Slumming
As though the privileged haven't sufficient intriguing places where they can satisfy their curiosity, their penchant for seeking out the extraordinary, their wish to experience out-of-the-way byways of life, now they begin to sign on to tourism slumming. Does the experience of having first-hand viewing of the lives of people living in squalid, crowded, unhygienic and hopeless conditions render their own privileged lives more validated, fleetingly banishing ennui?
The dreadful slums of India, where hundreds of thousands of under-privileged people live as a result of ancestry, lack of opportunities, discrimination and institutionalized poverty, are not pretty places. Certainly not places where one might imagine other people from abroad, entering the country as tourists, might wish to visit. The merely curious should save their money and read V.S. Naipaul's informative book, "India", to read about the conditions in which people live there.
There is no need to take part in a guided tour through the slums trapping millions of people in India, where there is no privacy, there is no sanitation, and little hope of escape. Read Rohinton Mistry's "A Fine Balance", and discover in those dense and hopeless passages what life for the unprivileged, the aspiring lower middle class is like. As it once was, so it still is for millions living in the sub-Continent.
Go all the way to India, and take a cheap tour, a mere $10 will pay your way for two and a half hours of winding through foetid alleyways, for the opportunity to glance into peoples' tin-roofed, cardboard-sided shacks, where the sanitation system is exemplified by the raw sewage running down alleys, between houses, where children play in the mud- and trash-filled alleyways, unaware of their place in the scheme of Indian sub-culture.
Where people desperately eke out a miserable living on the scraps of materials left over by those who disdain them, and relegate them to the garbage, to be picked over by the poor and the destitute, hoping to make a few rupees from transforming the rejects into usable items. In a huge slum like Mumbai's Dharavi district, the industrious poor slave in dreadful conditions to earn bread.
Clay pot makers, tool makers, leather tanneries (industries historically monopolized by the untouchables, the horribly exploited and traditionally despised Dalit) and bottle cap manufacturers ply their trade for little recompense. Recycling and re-assigning refuse from those more 'modern' and flashy and middle-class areas of society, steadily growing to swell the ranks of India's middle-class.
How do tourists actually gain anything by intruding on the tired sensibilities of slum dwellers by imposing their presence, by invading their group privacy (their individual privacy nonexistent)? Wouldn't they, if the situations were reversed, feel humiliated to be objects of curiosity? Why not do themselves a favour by staying home, reading a good book, and sending their air fare to local charities instead.
Charities that fund schools for the children of slum dwellers, that fund health clinics that offer services these poor people can receive nowhere else? Why not do that?
The dreadful slums of India, where hundreds of thousands of under-privileged people live as a result of ancestry, lack of opportunities, discrimination and institutionalized poverty, are not pretty places. Certainly not places where one might imagine other people from abroad, entering the country as tourists, might wish to visit. The merely curious should save their money and read V.S. Naipaul's informative book, "India", to read about the conditions in which people live there.
There is no need to take part in a guided tour through the slums trapping millions of people in India, where there is no privacy, there is no sanitation, and little hope of escape. Read Rohinton Mistry's "A Fine Balance", and discover in those dense and hopeless passages what life for the unprivileged, the aspiring lower middle class is like. As it once was, so it still is for millions living in the sub-Continent.
Go all the way to India, and take a cheap tour, a mere $10 will pay your way for two and a half hours of winding through foetid alleyways, for the opportunity to glance into peoples' tin-roofed, cardboard-sided shacks, where the sanitation system is exemplified by the raw sewage running down alleys, between houses, where children play in the mud- and trash-filled alleyways, unaware of their place in the scheme of Indian sub-culture.
Where people desperately eke out a miserable living on the scraps of materials left over by those who disdain them, and relegate them to the garbage, to be picked over by the poor and the destitute, hoping to make a few rupees from transforming the rejects into usable items. In a huge slum like Mumbai's Dharavi district, the industrious poor slave in dreadful conditions to earn bread.
Clay pot makers, tool makers, leather tanneries (industries historically monopolized by the untouchables, the horribly exploited and traditionally despised Dalit) and bottle cap manufacturers ply their trade for little recompense. Recycling and re-assigning refuse from those more 'modern' and flashy and middle-class areas of society, steadily growing to swell the ranks of India's middle-class.
How do tourists actually gain anything by intruding on the tired sensibilities of slum dwellers by imposing their presence, by invading their group privacy (their individual privacy nonexistent)? Wouldn't they, if the situations were reversed, feel humiliated to be objects of curiosity? Why not do themselves a favour by staying home, reading a good book, and sending their air fare to local charities instead.
Charities that fund schools for the children of slum dwellers, that fund health clinics that offer services these poor people can receive nowhere else? Why not do that?
Labels: Health, Human Fallibility, Poverty, Realities
posted by Pieface | 6:33 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home