24/03 - Departure, arrival in the Netherlands

Silence…
No car-hoinking…
Where are al the people gone to?
What’s with the snow…
Brr cold…
Everything in the Netherlands is so organized, formal and bureaucratic. I’d never would have noticed this without visiting Mumbai…

20/03 - Intervention

In the final week our task was to do some sort of intervention in our nagar. An intervention could be anything which ‘disturbs’ the daily life of the slum-dwellers. For example the group who got the 13th-coumpound as there nagar created a couch of bottles as a social element in the public space. A couch as the stereo type ‘public element’ in the public space.

What we did is to let the children in our nagar draw there ‘dream house’ and also what there father’s job is. What was quite interesting is that the children draw the exact same ‘ideal’ house as western children do. A hip roof, with a round window in it and two square windows symmetrically juxtapositioned with the entrance door in the middle of the façade. The house is positioned in a green hilly landscape with, of course, a beautiful smiling sunset. We pasted the results of our intervention al around our nagar on the walls of different slums. Our goal was to paste the drawings from the children on there dwelling were the live, but this was to difficult and to hectic in the end.

18/03 - Baptism

In our nagar, the Muslim-nagar, we were fortunate to experience the baptism of a boy and a girl. In the Muslim culture when a boy is being baptized, two goats are being sacrificed and for a girl, one goat. So in total three were sacrificed that day. The father of the boy explained to as the procedure of the sacrifice, the goat is being sacrificed according to ‘Hallal’. Which means that they cut the goats throat and let the blood flow out of it, so that the animal is clean. Which is different from ‘Hamar’ which means unclean.

After this explanation we joined the festivities and we got to ate the goat who had been sacrificed the same morning (and it tasted excellent :D)

16/03 - Ellora caves

This weekend we went to Aurangabad, to the Ellora caves. There is a total of 32 temples witch represent different religions, carved out of the rocks. Temple 16, the middle one, is by far the most important and the most beautiful of them. This is an Hindu temple with the name Kailasha, Shiva’s mountain abode. This rock cut out architecture is regarded as the greatest monolithic structure in the world. The task of cutting out the approximately 3.000.000 cubic square feet of rock must have occupied at least one hundred years.

Food

The food in India is superb!! Usually I’m very picky with food, but almost everything I ate here was delicious. I think this is the only country in the world where I could be a vegetarian :D Below are some pictures of the food. Chicken masala, chicken afghani, masala dosa. The good stuff.

10/03 - Mapping Dharavi main road

The object here was to map the more important roads in Dharavi. You have the 90ft road, the 60ft road and the Dharavi main road as the three main roads. Furthermore you have some smaller ones. We got the Dharavi main road as our road to analyze. We analysed it at three different times, during the morning, afternoon and the evening. What is most peculiar in general to say about the results is that this road never sleeps. At every time of the day there is activity going on.

Dharavi is a highly dens area of course, almost every square inch is being build upon. Except a cricket field which we came across. It was interesting to see that they leave this space open.

08/03 - Trainride

This day we visited some temples and some mosques. But the train ride that day was a very intense experience for me. The amount of people waiting is enormous and as soon as the train arrives you feel the tension of the people. The moment it stops it is every man for himself, trying the board in the limited time it stops. If you manage to get on the train the next goal is to stay on it, during the next stops it will make.

Compared to the Netherlands this is very informal and for me a fascinating experience. In the Netherlands everything is arranged, the guy blows his whistle after checking nobody is entering or exciting, the doors close, machinist waits for the green signal to depart etc.. In Mumbai the doors are always open, the train just stops for 4-5 sec and that’s the time you have to get on or get of. What also strikes me is that ‘almost everybody’ buys a train ticket, although I haven’t seen one single guy checking if you have a ticket.

Video of the trainride