Guiding Questions

Please watch the documentary and acquaint yourselves with Mike Davis’s book Planet of Slums. A PDF version is also freely available online, where you can use the search function to look up keywords (e.g., ‘British’, ‘India’).

1. "Today's poor megacities - Nairobi, Lagos, Bombay, Dhaka, and so on - are stinking mountains of shit that would appall even the most hardened Victorians. (Except, perhaps, Rudyard Kipling, a connoisseur, who in The City of Dreadful Night happily distinguished the 'Big Calcutta Stink' from the unique pungencies of Bombay, Peshawar, and Benares.)" How would you describe Mike Davis's writing style, and how would you evaluate it?
2. Please explain what Davis says about the role of the British Empire in the emergence of slums on the Indian subcontinent.
3. Please describe, drawing on Mike Davis’s book and the documentary, what the typical daily life of slum residents (on the Indian subcontinent) looks like, what the most pressing problems they face are, and what additional hardships especially women and children have to endure.
4. For me, perhaps the most depressing point of all in Davis’s book is the medical metaphor of the "late-capitalist triage of humanity"; what does this mean for India?