The story of Stephanie Epps.

A multimedia video for UnLtd India on Ramesh Joshi, a young man who started an organization called Aashansh. Ramesh works hard to make sure that children who live on the street in Mumbai are getting an education and supports them with after school programs and resources for learning.

Another video for UnLtd India. This one is on the group Cycle Chalao (chalao means “let’s go”), which rents bicycles to university students in Mumbai. Their goal is to be a self-sufficient business with the aim of creating alternative and sustainable commuting options in the city and teaching people the importance of cutting down on pollution and traffic through the use of bicycles.

This is a project I did for UnLtd India on Abhishek Bharadwaj, who runs a non-profit called Alternative Realities. Abhishek’s organization helps homeless people in Mumbai by assessing their needs and challenges and connecting them to resources. One part of his work involves running a night tour of homeless communities for people who are interested in learning more about the issue and what they can do to help. 

Grassroutes - Rural tourism in India. This was a project for UnLtd India in the spring of 2011. Inir is an “investee” of UnLtd India, where he is given various types of support to help get his social business going strong.

another parade materializes out of nowhere for something…

Max ZT playing his Dulcimer at the Hub in Mumbai.

I have one month left in Mumbai and have written very little since I got here. Most of my days are filled from start to finish with walking, talking, listening to all of the infinite sounds of this city, visiting people and photographing them, asking them about their stories, recording things.

It’s amazing to me how many people live in this small space. You feel it every morning when you wake up; the noise and dust and movement of 17 million bodies starting their day. This city does not sleep. Here, in the western “suburbs” (aka Bandra — a city within a city), you at least have a brief pause in the middle of the night. At 5am the crows and pigeons start up. Then, the rickshaws taking people to work and to the train. With the rickshaws begins the relentless cacophony of car horns that endures throughout the day. Next come the men and women selling anything from chillies to figs to brooms to chai. After repeating the same call over and over, they sound like machines imitating human voices.

After I began visiting the slums for my work, I realized that my complaint about lack of personal space was incomparable to what most people in this city put up with on a daily basis. Small one-bedroom huts or apartments can house anywhere from 5 to 10 or more people. They take shifts sleeping, or build lofted beds on the wall or sleep outside to make due. Newly-married couples share small spaces with their parents. It is a reality of life for millions of people to almost never, ever have any space or time that belongs to them.

The slums are enormous, housing in some cases hundreds of thousands of people. About a month ago, a fire started in a hut and spread quickly. Within an hour, it was moving fast and no fire trucks were coming to the rescue. When they finally did come, about 2,000 homes were engulfed in flames. (The photo above is a picture of the site the day after the fire.) Sometimes, when a construction site is completed, a slum will be demolished to remove the eyesore, with almost no warning to its inhabitants. I talked to a 19 year old who said that a couple years ago his family was given 30 minutes to collect all their belongings and evacuate their hut before it was destroyed. He had to break down the inside walls in order to get everything out in time. His family was also left homeless after this for some time before they found a place out in the real suburbs — a 2 hour train ride from the city. He recently founded a non-profit that mentors and educates homeless children and he is probably one of the most inspiring people I have ever met.

finally, footage from my night during the india-pakistan cricket match. only other time i’ve seen anything that even rivaled this craziness was in DC when Obama was elected.

Amit… he’s so bollywood.