Beyond The Bollywood Of Mumbai

Mumbai the city of dreams, is the capital of Maharashtra. [ Maharashtra is a state located on the west of India. Maharashtra became a state of India in the 1950’s]. Mumbai is the birthplace of Bollywood and is home to a lot of celebrities. Mumbai offers a lot of job opportunities and thus is occupied by a lot of immigrants. The shopping centers here are very huge and have a lot of options. People from around the country come here for the cheap things you get here. Mumbai has many things to focus on other than the Bollywood.

Slums

Mumbai has the biggest slums in the country. If you travel through the Bandra-Dharavi stretch, you see a lot of people living in the slums. Slums has always been a sensitive part to the Mumbaikars. They say that more than 50% of Mumbai stays in Slums. It is not necessary that all of them are poor, some of them are forced to live there because of inadequate housing facilities. Most of the slums do not have private toilets and people have to use paid public washrooms. Since migrants have unbearable conditions in the city, there are a number of NGO’s that try to help them. The condition in these slums keep on worsening, they need the attention of India.

Traffic

If you have ever been to Mumbai, you have to be stuck in the traffic. As I talked to resident, she felt that there are ample of reasons for the traffic. Firstly, Mumbai has a lot of population, some people here own private vehicles. That some is equal to at least 1 million, thus there is traffic. Another reason as seen, was road blockage or fixing the road. It takes the BMC a lot of time to fix them, thus those roads are not to be traveled on. Since these roads cannot be traveled on, the people use other routes, causing conjunction. It is a mega city with a lot of traffic and this is perfectly shown on-screen.

Trains

The local trains are something that are really unique to Mumbai. The trains there are like buses, every 5 mins one arrives. There are three lines in local services: -western [travels to Virar/Bandra], central [ travels to Dadar/Kurla] and harbor [CST to Panvel]. There are almost ¾ of the total people travelling by train to work or school. It is true that it is overcrowded and sometimes very dangerous. The people travel by trains, because these are really superfast and have seating arrangements.