Word: slumming
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...girls tried it. Soon a few of the housewives began smoking, and finally some of the dads would take a hit or two when they were out of corn whiskey. Now it has reached the point that on weekend nights, it's hard to find anyone in the slum who isn't smoking the mad medicine...
...This slum doesn't have a name. The 5,000 residents call it Ban Chua Gan, which translates roughly as Do It Yourself Happy Homes. The expanse of jerry-built wood-frame huts with corrugated steel roofs sprawls in a murky bog in Bangkok's Sukhumvit district, in the shadow of 40-story office buildings and glass-plated corporate towers. The inhabitants migrated here about a decade ago from villages all around Thailand. Jacky came from Nakon Nayok, a province near Bangkok's Don Muang airport, seeking financial redemption in the Asian economic miracle. And for a while...
When the yaba runs out after much of the slum's population has been up for two days bingeing, many of the inhabitants feel a bit like Jacky, cooped up in her squalid little hut, her mouth turned down into a scowl and her eyes squinted and empty and mean. She looks as if she wants something. And if she thinks you have what she wants, look out. She slices at her cuticles with the straight razor. And curses Bing...
...Ranong avenue next to the Klong Toey slum, they meet up with hundreds of other bikers from other slums like Makasan and Suan Phloo. They have been holding these rallies for a decade, some of the kids first coming on the backs of their older brother's bikes. Ken rot is a ritual by now, as ingrained in Thai culture as the speed they smoke to get up for the night of racing. The street is effectively closed off to non-motorcyclists and pedestrians. The bikers idle along the side of the road and then take off in twos...
Private memories are a different story. I get a final glimpse into Gujarat's wounded psyche on my last night at Girishbhai's camp. Most of the people?mainly slum dwellers?seem in good spirits. Women gossip and giggle as they help the volunteers cook up a fresh batch of khichdi, a nutritious mixture of rice and lentils. The men are kept in splits by a barber's risqu? jokes. "Our homes were not worth much, so it will be easy to rebuild them," says 60-year-old Haji Aftab. "We feel sorry for the rich and the middle-class...