Slums and poverty

A slum is a run-down area of a city, characterzied by substandard housing, squalor, and lacking in tenure security. It is poverty on the highest level, they don't own anything, kids never go too school and their parents mostly don't have a job. They don't have clean drink water and hardly something to eat. The children go to landfills and search for something they can sell to a dealer.

About every seventh human on earth live in a district like a slum, that means a place where there is high criminality, discrimination, povertry and diseases. Mostly you will find slums in bigger citys like Mumbai in India, a place where children run arround naked and hungry, and their mothers wash their clothes in dirty rivers, if they have clothes!

The slums of India's mega cities are looking back on a long history of development and the sanitary and social conditions of indian slums today, especially the city of Calcutta, is considered the world's most formidable. The inhabitants of India, describe the slums of the different regions and cities with specific names, to refer to the type of house, the type of the distruction and the material that was used:

Bustees: are small cottages which are built from mud pieces. Walls and roofs are covered with canvas bag, timber or metal.

Chawls: the buildings of the slums in Mumbai are known as chawls. There are often more than 3 families living in a room, where the sun never shines, not even in the noon, it is always dark. Because of lack of space, the residents of the chawls sleep alternately.

Katras: small one-room houses, most of them were built in rows. Many of Katras in Delhi are parts of old houses of the Muslims who were originally protect against looting and also that women should protect here from the gaze of men who did not belong to the family.

In the book Slumdog Millionaire we read about the chawls, no matter in what kind of city Ram is, he allways live in chawls. Not with other families but with his friends.

But we meet family Shantaram and they live with the whole family in one room, and the walls are so thin that everyone in the other rooms can hear what's going on in the other rooms, like Ram hears, that Mr. Shantaram is beating his wife and daughter, and also will rape his daughter.

You will find poverty in the whole book it is sad in how many ways poverty can shows. First time we meet it in the Juvenile Home where Ram was send to after father Timothy was shot down.

”The Juvenile Home has a capacity of seventh-five,and a juvenile population of one hundred and fifty. It is cramped, noisy and dirty.” (page 91)

Also when Ram and Salim be send to Sethji, there is a gangster who makes money with kids which can sing, but not in a good way. He takes boys from the Jouvenile Home and pay for a music teacher, when the kids can sing, they become blind or he cuts their arms or legs and so he send them out in the streets where they shall sing, so people get sympathy with them and give them money. The minimum amount lay by hundred dollars every day, when not they get nothing to eat. (Chapter 4) Also this is a kind of poverty, cause no one look after these children, and they live their lifes in constant fear. The book shows generel many sides of poverty and it's sad, that this isn't only fiction but happens every day all over the world.