Currencies of change

"Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. 

Today I am wise, so I am changing myself."

Rumi

The world is vast.  The more I travel, the more aware I become of the diversity and more precisely, the multi-dimensionality of social issues and inequalities.  When I first started moving between East and West, North and South, what is glaringly is the poverty.  With time, you stop seeing poverty as the defining characteristic of a city or country.  Even if what you are most interested in is poverty, you start to see it through a prism, rather than as a uniform experience or thing.  You look at infrastructure—roads, electricity, water, cell phones—and service provision—schools, police, health care, social protection—and perhaps above all—aspiration.  Coming from America, the rate of social change in Asia is something that constantly takes my breath away.  It’s not unusual to have three generations coexisting under one roof, but each with a very different set of values, that often conflict.  In Delhi, I would see a girl who looked like she was dressed to walk around Manhattan, happily chattering on an iphone, with a bag of Nike sports gear on her arm, with a mother in a traditional sari trailing a few steps behind.  Newspapers had articles about how to get over a bad breakup just pages after the tragic news of a husband shot by his wife’s family, who disapproved of their decision to elope and marry for love.  Social change itself is a complex, multidimensional process that is far from unidirectional.  The massive migration of villagers to cities has meant that in some ways, they have grown more conservative.  Since I have parachuted just in and out of India over the years, much of the change is invisible to me, but not all. The Haus Khaus Village that I discovered in 2009 on my first trip to Delhi is an example of an old artist hangout that transformed into a hipster center, complete with coffee shops and eccentric restaurants, and now has fully blossomed into high-end art galleries, designer stores, and expensive bars.  Luckily my restaurant Gunpowder, serving delicious Southern Indian food in a great space that looks out on the lake, seems to have weathered the change.  I went to lunch at Elma’s teashop and had baked eggs and ham.  Strange concept that was saved by the huge amount of gruyere cheese that covered it.  I followed it by a slice of red velvet cake, which had icing that just melted in your mouth.

But I digress; my love of food seems to distract me often. I was in India to visit a slew of organizations and social entrepreneurs in Delhi, Bangalore, and Mumbai.  In Bangalore, someone organized an event at a bar around my visit, and to my surprise, 20-ish people showed up, all working on really interesting stuff.  I’m skeptical of social entrepreneurship (if interested, see recent article in the NYT that discusses the limitations), but love the fact that so many talented people are passionate about changing the world.  And it’s perhaps that realization—that across the world there is that core group of inspired people hard at work to make a better world—that was the most energizing about the trip.  I met a few people from the government that are brilliant and impassioned about changing the system from within.  In Bangalore, a group has started a website called “I paid a bribe” (that has gone international) and mobilizing citizens around changing their cities.  These mechanisms to convert frustrated and disillusionment into action are critical, as the world has witnessed several times over the last year the raw violence that explodes when no peaceful routes seem to exist.  In Mumbai, I met with activists who had brought about legal change that gave poor people the same rights to live in the city as the rich—ending the era when the government could just burn down low income housing (i.e. slums) indiscriminately in the name of civic improvement.  In communities that would be deemed “transient” and “without any social networks”, an organization helped women organize into local groups and learn to map their community, present data to city officials, and advocate their way into housing and other protections.  In one case in the 1980s, the demolition team came that destroy everyone's houses and kick them out, and the women told their husbands to let them stand in front.  They intuitively knew that the team wouldn’t physically attack women the way they would attack men.  “You have to give us time to pack up and move,” they said, holding their ground in front of their community.  The demolition team backed down.

I had a chance to visit some of the buildings where pavement dwellers, including many that used to live in shanties along the railroad had been moved.  Resettlement projects are often criticized as a strategy, and certainly it’s not a panacea (it tends to reward families that have a long tenure in a location and is small in magnitude compared to population of the slums; families are relocated out of prime real estate into disconnected areas with no services or jobs; many times relocated families rent/sell their apartment and move into another slum).  But there’s that famous story about the man on the beach throwing starfish back into the ocean.  The other person says, “why are you doing that?  There are so many that it won’t make a difference.”  And he says, as he tosses one back, “It made a difference to that one.”  In the quest for large scale solutions, we shouldn’t toss small-scale successes aside.  And the legal implications of recognizing slum dwellers as people that should have access to services, security, and potentially even housing, is pretty remarkable.  For residents of the slum next to my neighborhood, here in Dhaka, for example, get no water or electricity supplied legally, and as a result pay up to 6x’s as much as me (and the city of course sees none of that since it’s all pirated)!  It’s far from black and white and definitely a complex process; resettlement is a step in the right direction given the circumstances.

I met a woman who had moved into one of these resettlement buildings, up on the 5^th floor, who is struggling to run a shop.  She used to make about Rs 500 (US$ 10) daily with her store facing into the pavement dwelling community in a busy area, but now up on the 5^th floor, purchases are mainly from others in her building and rarely amount to more than Rs 100 (US$ 2).  Her husband and son are still on the pavement, so that her son can finish this year of school (mid-year transfers are not allowed).  Whether they will stay in this building long-term will be seen.  She was a long-time member of a women’s group, and a leader.  She’d spent time in Bangkok, Cambodia, South Africa, and even a full month in Kenya working with poor women to advocate for and build resettlement homes.  This kind of grassroots diplomacy is pretty exciting.  I remember how I felt in a conference in India a few years ago, where a white guy from DC gave a presentation about the experience of commercial sex workers in India, and it felt like perhaps that there were others that could more authentically tell the story.  To take women from Mumbai who have fought for their own housing to other countries to work with women engaged in the same battle is simple and brilliant, but flies in the face of the norms in development.   It also validates the idea that there are fundamental power dynamics and shared experiences of poverty that are much less local that we sometimes think.  De-localizing issues, whether it be by organizing slum dwellers from across Mumbai, or Maharashtra, or India, or the world, could be powerful, particularly if these efforts are joined by the activists with the understanding of the courts, laws, policies, etc. that have to change to sustain gains.

I had a chance to sit with a few women and have a cup of chai (tea).  One was from Assam and spoke Bengali, and I could follow some of the Hindi, particularly with the woman accompanying me filling in the details here and there.  They were all in their late 40s or 50s and with the exception of running a store or tailoring business from home; none were employed in a formal sense other than the one working for the organization that supported the collective.  Two of them had put their daughters in English medium schools. I asked if they thought the next generation of women had the same commitment to this kind of collective work.  They worried that girls today were busy with school and dreaming of jobs to do this.  Ironic how aspirations—the freedoms that one generation makes for the next—lead to shifting priorities and new ways to live out the freedoms that are more attainable now.  It may be bad news for the established self-help groups themselves, but is a larger societal victory that women’s time is increasingly valuable.  Is success in development making yourself irrelevant?  Or learning how to stay relevant in a changing world?