Mumbai Inevitably one cycles back what what hears that is new back to what one knows that is old from your own experience. The more I kept looking at the poster for the bands from Norway and the United Kingdom playing for people in Dharavi in honor of ACORN’s work [...]
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Mumbai We were up and out early into the Monday morning traffic where Vinod had been invited to speak about about the environmental impact of recycling by our waste pickers in Dharavi to a class at the B. M. Ruia Girls’ College, a junior college of sorts with 1500 students served in [...] Mumbai The outside had a new coat of brown paint on the corrugated sheet metal, which served as walls against the wooden beams and framing open to the sky and elements in many places. A local community “electrician” was still working on lights for the sorting room. From the roadway [...] Mumbai I had left Delhi listening to reports of the heat wave there as we pushed forward with our meetings. Over 41 C which seems to have been around 106 degrees Fahrenheit. I knew we were hot, but I thought that was the fire lit by the passion of the [...] Delhi The ACORN India staff in Delhi, Dharmendra Kumar, Om Prakash, and Animesh Halder and me sat around the table at Tej Abode or XY Lodging for almost 6 hours wrestling with organizing plans for the coming months. We framed the demands on a potential Commonwealth Games Campaign including a list [...] Delhi The chai whalla was doing well because the meeting was starting slowly as drivers finished their last “school” runs and began drifting into the recruitment meeting in this section of East Delhi. It was a good spot across the thoroughfare from the licensing building where we had blocked traffic recently [...] Delhi Every conversation Dharmendra Kumar, ACORN India’s Delhi Director, and I had about our communities in East Delhi and especially about our emerging unions of informal workers, kept running into the up coming Commonwealth Games to be held starting October 3rd a little less than 6 months away. This was especially [...] Delhi There’s no way around it – moving half-way across the world still is a schlep, as they say, even at these prices. I climbed onto Qatar Airlines, heavily promoted as a 5 star carrier, in Dulles (DC) a little before midnight on Monday night and stepped off the plane in [...] |
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