Now that I am officially the Monk who chucked his Honda City….well not actually a monk, but I did chuck it, I decided to walk into places I never would have.

Last evening I decided to walk into the large slum opposite my house….as I started walking past a row of filthy auto garages that had garbage dumped on the road next to them, the first thing I noticed was a young boy, not more than 16 or 17 years pushing the latest KTM Duke motorcycle. This motorcycle has been setting the sales charts on fire and has ubercool value attached to it and yet here it was, right in the middle of Asia’s biggest slum!!

As I walked further past restaurants that were grilling kebabs…..the smells of which were made in heaven, and yet I somehow did not dare to touch them, I saw a few kids riding cycles. Now you do expect kids from all economic and social strata to ride cycles, but these bikes looked like high end stuff (Trek’s and Maxit’s), not your run off the mill Hero’s and Atlas’s. These bikes are stolen was my first thought, but then I thought so many?? There probably is a second hand bike shop somewhere in Shivaji Nagar and these boys are buying them from there….yet these cycles were right there in the middle of Asia’s biggest slum!!

The road curved to the right and as I was walking past a row of scrap and poultry shops, I suddenly noticed a little pigeon hole of a shop selling flat screen TV’s!! The board of the shop rather incongruously had ‘ Airtel ‘ to the left and ‘ Samsung ‘ to the right. A little further down there was a cell tower set up in the little gap between two shanties. Imagine selling the latest flat screens and mobiles right here in the middle of Asia’s biggest slum!!

The walk now took me over a bridge and there was huge digging being done as the ‘ Eastern Freeway ‘, the latest infrastructure project in Mumbai that promises a South Mumbai to Chembur, journey in 22 minutes is being readied. This meant there was a big mess, and I needed to step off the road and take a little side path, there at the bottom of the path again I came across shops that were cheek a jowl and two of them stood out, one was a Bajaj motorcycle service centre where motorcycles of varying ages were being serviced and the next shop were two buffalo’s and this shop made and sold dung cakes that are used for burning. This contrast of the latest versus the oldest continued to shock me right in the middle of Asia’s biggest slum!!

A few feet further from here was a man with a handlebar mustache and a golf hat placed jauntily at an angle on his head, standing right next to bright red and ivory coloured Vespa scooter, model probably of the 1970’s and on the front mud guard rather nicely placed was a reasonable rendition of an airliner!! I could not resist it and so asked the man, whose name is Manohar if I could take a picture of him along with his scooter and he readily agreed, as we shook hands, he told me that the garage behind was his and he did this sort of work and his pride of procession was a similar coloured Lambretta scooter of 1962 vintage, inside his garage was a flatbed Chevy truck of 1970’s vintage which he said was used film shooting!! All this right in the middle of Asia’s biggest slum!!

As the walk continued all around me was grinding filth and what I perceived poverty, and yet every little shanty had a TV and a ‘ Videocon ‘ dish on its roof. So, were these person’s actually poor or was prosperity slowly trickling into this poorest of the poor pocket in Mumbai??

All around me I saw progress, I saw all person’s between 6 and 60 hard at work, be it in restaurants, scrap yards, garages or illegal picture houses. There were young boys and old ladies sitting outside country liquor bar’s selling boiled eggs to the labourers who had a drink after a hard day’s work and were returning back to their little shanty they called home. I saw laughter wherever I walked, this showed that the happiness quotient was high!

The walk also convinced me that sometimes you need to slow down and look around you, I had driven this route a 1000 times before in my ‘ Honda City ‘, the old ‘ Honda City Mani ‘ used to look straight ahead and refuse to look what he perceived as the dregs of society ( some of them probably are ), but also all around of him he saw enterprise. This is what makes Mumbai and through Mumbai, India what it is!!

This also convinced me that giving up the Corporate job was probably the best thing that happened to me, I was now firmly on a path of discovery, the bungee jump is well and truly on its way….