Spikning

Fresh from the printer. With a dark purple globe. The book!

With my PhD submitted and everything on track for the defence, I am also happy to report that I have been given the Hong Kong post-doc! Flights for Anna and me now booked for 28 December, leaving me with about forty days left in Europe to tie up all loose threads and clear out what has been my Lund office for six years.

JNU Campus coffee

Boardrooms and slums

A two-hour domestic flight up to Delhi with Jet Airways. Time to recollect my impressions and try to make some sense of the last few days. Much as I had expected, Mumbai immediately hit me with its dire poverty and newfound riches. Massive high-rise buildings rising into the sky, driven by speculation, next to places like the Dhobi Ghat, where the “washing caste” still washes linen by hand for hospitals and other institutions.

On the second day here, we went to the offices of Tata Financial Services. Tata is one of the world’s largest industrial conglomerates, with businesses in virtually every field, from tea to cars (including the already legendary Nano). At the office we visited, they were developing IT solutions for banks, airlines and other transaction-intensive businesses like insurance companies. As they outlined their globalization strategy and described how they had succeeded in moving up the value chain from simple labour-intensive programming tasks to becoming fully fledged IT partners, I could not help but smile. This is the world of the 21st century, a world in which an ever-tighter web of interdependence is being woven, and a world in which war is increasingly becoming a historic anomaly. As companies continue to integrate their electronic infrastructure across borders, the enemy is no longer a distant Other but rather the ones who make sure that your cheque clears or that your flight is on time. Sitting in their fancy boardroom, eating Indian appetizers while listening to their plans to increase the number of women in their workforce, the happy “planetary future” that I often write about suddenly seemed to be within reach.

The following morning, we were scheduled to go on a “slum tour” of Dharavi. When I first saw this point in the programme back in Sweden, I must admit that I felt repulsed. And when the people from Reality Tours picked us up outside our hotel in white safari-style SUVs, I feared that my worst suspicions were about to be confirmed. However, once we got out to Dharavi, things were very different from what I had expected. First, it is worth pointing out that it is not the poorest people in India, but rather the lower middle class, who live in slums. Second, there are slums that are a lot worse than Dharavi. Still, I was surprised to see all the activity, the happy faces of children who greeted us with curiosity, and the strong drive towards modernization. Looking ten or twenty years into the future, one could well imagine a very different Dharavi. On a less positive note, much of the work carried out in Dharavi involves the recycling of plastics, aluminium and other metals, work that is done without proper equipment or protection, with possibly disastrous long-term effects. It was also possible to see that the caste system was still very much alive in Dharavi, with Dalits, historically excluded from the traditional caste hierarchy, doing the worst tasks, such as emptying the public toilets or cleaning the alleys.