Sylvia's Journal

Life for anyone poor, men, women and children, is fragile. As we walked through the recycling section of the Dharavi slums, where we saw only men, we followed the various steps of the plastic recycling business  (plastic gets picked apart and sorted, then pulverized, then washed, then dried and then sold). Pay rises from the first step to the last. I don’t know if there is a career path but I expect many don’t live long enough. Life expectancy is low and sanitary conditions are poor or non-existent. General working condition would not pass the OHSA test: sharp edges as plastic is separated from non plastic material, sound overload from the antiquated cutting machines, fumes, live wires dangling everywhere and sewage sludge underfoot. Protection against those hazards depends entirely on the benevolence of the owner or boss.  

As for kids, I suspect neonatal, infant and under five mortality is high. Hundreds of kids ran barefoot across playfields (rubble-strewn lots) that we’d consider a health hazard.

But women are vulnerable no matter where they were born or to whom they were born. 

One night I watched the local evening news showing crowds of angry women, fists in the air. I guessed they were protesting the slow response of the courts to a series of rapes; a most recent one even making the news on NPR the day before I left: a young vet, in her early 20s, had her moped tires punctured and was raped and then burned by four youngsters. Newspapers are full of reports of rapes and gruesome murders – often perpetrated by people close to the deceased in response to some insult or injustice (perceived or real).  This one caused a media frenzy (like the one some years ago when a young woman was gang raped on a bus), probably because she was ‘one of us,’ that is, the educated elite. This made the crime seem more serious than the 1000s of similar gruesome events that are happening daily in places where the elites never come or never heard of. 

People take justice into their own hands because they are frustrated with the courts. When judicial procedures are cumbersome or courts overloaded (or corrupt or incompetent) and trust in the legal system is low, that’s how justice is done. The four perpetrators of this latest gang rape were shot by the police before they were even indicted. And the crowds cheered.