Gerson da Cunha

"People who come to Bombay to look for a job, find one, but they are left to themselves by the city services. It's as if the city says to them, 'Look after yourselves. The housing, power and water is up to you.' As a result of this, migrants are encouraged to encroach and so, slums are formed," he elaborates, pointing out that we live in a city two-thirds of which is covered in slums.

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What does someone who has recently moved to the city, or a millennial born in a Mumbai of collapsing buildings, water-logged roads and endless traffic snarls, not know about its past, we ask da Cunha. "That the water here was such that you could drink it from the tap, and that the roads used to be washed with chlorinated water," he says.

In the talk, he is also going to devote some time to the BDD Chawls, which the Bombay Development Department after which they are named, took on as a massive project in 1947 to provide housing to the mass influx of labourers in Bombay from rural India. From a city that embraced its new denizens with open arms, to a city with cruel real estate prices that turn a blind eye towards its vast majority, it wouldn't be wrong to call Mumbai a mere shadow of Bombay.

On: August 11, 6 pm
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