Word: dharavi
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Dates: during 2005-2005
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...first time he can remember, India's richest film-maker is having trouble with his math. Specifically, how 600,000 goes into 175. The first figure is the population of Dharavi, Asia's most populous slum, which he's currently exploring. The second is the number of hectares Dharavi covers in Bombay, an area half the size of New York City's Central Park. In a different life, Shekhar Kapur spent seven years crunching numbers as a corporate planner for a multinational oil company. He surveys the tiny one-room lean-tos where teeming families live shoulder to shoulder...
...really stumps Kapur is the giant water pipe on which he's balancing. The duct cuts through the maze of rubbish-strewn roofs and filthy alleys to carry water to the seafront Art Deco apartments of Colaba, the flashiest neighborhood in India's most swanky town. But here in Dharavi, a lost city under the overpasses linking the airport with the steel-and-glass blocks downtown, the only running water is what seeps out of cracks in the pipe. Which brings Kapur to other difficult digits. Like 150, the number of working toilets in Dharavi. Or 20, the number...
...calculation leads Kapur to two conclusions. One: "Water will soon be the world's most valuable commodity, and places like Dharavi will have none." Two: he's going to make a film about it. This project, Water (Paani in Hindi), has become such an obsession that despite commitments to direct Morgan Freeman in a film about Nelson Mandela and Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush in a sequel to Elizabeth, as well as co-writing a biopic on the life of Buddha, Kapur recently left the West after 10 years in London and Los Angeles and moved back to Bombay. "This...
...With Water, Kapur may be taking the greatest risk of his career, transforming himself from a director famed for opulent spectacle into a low-bud-get crusader for the oppressed. But as he tours the movie's setting in Dharavi, he revels in the prospect of making a film that combines Indian melodrama with economics. "It's 20 years from now," says Kapur, explaining the plot. "There's an upper city like Vegas and a lower city like this. And all the water is sucked up by the upper city." He points at a group of skinny girls slapping foamy...
...movie, the divide leads to revolution. In real life, Kapur says, Dharavi will somehow adapt to its unpromising future. In reality, he adds, Bombay's rich are not nasty, but they have too little contact with the poor to understand their plight. "Over there," he says, indicating the high-rises, "they believe toilet paper is soft and beautiful. Here, they know it's to wipe yourself." Money can blind as well as dazzle, he's saying. Sometimes it just gets in the way. And he would know...